8. EQUITY INVESTMENTS IN JOINT VENTURES

The following table presents our equity investment in a joint venture and ownership interest in MarEn.

	Ownership Interest			June 30, 2017		December 31, 2016
	(in millions)
MarEn Bakken Company LLC		75.0	%	$	1,563.1	$	—

On February 15, 2017, our joint venture with Marathon Petroleum Corporation (MPC), MarEn, closed its acquisition of the Bakken Pipeline System with Bakken Holdings Company LLC (Bakken Holdings), an affiliate of Energy Transfer Partners, L.P. and Sunoco Logistics Partners L.P., to acquire a 49% equity interest in Bakken Pipeline Investments LLC (BPI). BPI owns 75% of the Bakken Pipeline System. Under this arrangement, we and MPC indirectly hold 75% and 25%, respectively, of MarEn’s 49% interest in BPI. The purchase price of our effective 27.6% interest in the Bakken Pipeline System was $1.5 billion.

The Bakken Pipeline System was placed into service on June 1, 2017, which consists of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and the Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline (ETCOP). It connects the prolific Bakken formation in North Dakota to markets in eastern Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts (PADD II) and the United States Gulf Coast, providing customers with access to premium markets at a competitive cost. For further details regarding our funding arrangement, refer to Note 14 Related Party Transactions.

We account for our investment in MarEn under the equity method of accounting. For the six months ended June 30, 2017, we recognized $6.4 million in “Other income” in our consolidated statements of income representing our equity earnings for this investment, net of amortization of the purchase price basis difference.

Our equity investment includes the unamortized excess of the purchase price over the underlying net book value (basis difference), of the investees’ assets at the purchase date, which is comprised of $14.4 million in goodwill and $931.4 million in amortizable assets included within the Liquids segment. We amortized $2.9 million for the six months ended June 30, 2017, which was recorded as a reduction to equity earnings.