The housing crash didn’t kill MLPs and neither did the collapse of crude prices in 2009 or of natural gas prices in 2012. The sector has survived countless scares about tax reform in Washington (good luck with that), rising interest rates (not rising lately), dodgy accounting (mostly just complicated accounting, it turns out) and now the shutdown/debt ceiling farce.

And it turns out this powerful bull market is still plenty strong enough to survive some profit-taking and taunting. Put down its graceful aging to the surge in domestic energy output that, long before the US stops importing crude, will turn it into the low-cost exporter of an entire range of value-added fuels and petrochemicals.

When you’re growing your business 15 to 25 percent a year, as MLPs like Oiltanking Partners (NYSE: OILT), Magellan Midstream (NYSE: MMP), Sunoco Logistics (NYSE: SXL) and EQT Midstream (NYSE: EQM) are, whatever yield you choose to pay becomes only a down payment.

This growth spurt looks set to last as long as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing continue to extract a fountain of hydrocarbons from plentiful rock. Which is to say that it could run for quite a while.

As it happens, OILT was the best-performing MLP in our portfolios over the last month, along with the two names recommended in the last issue. You’ll find news on all of the newsletter’s recommendations in Portfolio Update.

This month’s Sector Spotlight takes an in-depth look at the midstream opportunities opening up above a shale formation that is only just getting started but has already attracted a ton of both capital and hype. The reserves in the Utica Shale may not quite measure up to those in the Marcellus Shale it overlaps. But the returns to the drillers, gatherers and shippers with the right assets in the right locations promise to be just as lucrative.

As it happens, there’s no need to choose between the Utica and the Marcellus, because the two strongest gathering and processing MLPs in the East aim to dominate both. And while they compete for local business and for the chance to ship the region’s gas to the the Gulf Coast, the opportunity set is big enough for both MarkWest Energy Partners (NYSE: MWE) and Williams Companies (NYSE: WMB) to emerge as winners. Best Buys makes the case for not choosing among them.

This month’s In Spotlight digs into the year’s biggest MLP IPO to date, one offering investors a stake in the general partner to one of the largest US pipeline partnerships. The pricing on the pending deal suggests its incentive distribution rights are worth almost as much as the cash flow stream from which they are derived. Is the marketing of this stake a sign that sponsors no longer think the growth will last? I wouldn’t bet on that just yet.