A Super Bowl game (and halftime show) for the ages followed up only hours later by a made-in-heaven combination of two of the largest, most admired E&Ps in the super-hot Permian? It doesn’t get any better than this, unless you’re a Taylor Swift fan too — in which case, it may be impossible for you to “shake it off.” In today’s RBN blog, we examine the newly announced plan by Diamondback Energy and Endeavor Energy Resources to combine into a Travis Kelce-sized Permian pure play with more than 800 Mboe/d of crude oil-focused production and more than 6,000 well locations with breakevens of $40/bbl or less.
Daily Energy Blog
Tuesday, 2/13/2024
Category:
Financial
Monday, 2/12/2024
Category:
Crude Oil
A handful of U.S. midstreamers are striving to build an offshore export buoy in the Gulf of Mexico that would be able to fully load a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC). If successful, they could facilitate a new wave of crude oil export flows and dynamics. With domestic production back to record highs and global supply and demand dynamics in a constant state of flux, the market developments along the Gulf Coast are something the oil industry is eying intently. In today’s RBN blog, we look at the latest on two export projects — Phillips 66 and Trafigura's Bluewater Texas Terminal and Sentinel Midstream’s Texas GulfLink.
Friday, 2/09/2024
Category:
Natural Gas
Since the mid-2010s, Mexico’s Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) has developed a massive fleet of natural-gas-fired combined-cycle plants and helped to underwrite the buildout of a far-reaching network of gas pipelines from South Texas and West Texas into and through much of Mexico. Now, there’s a big push to extend that network southeast through the Yucatán Peninsula to serve new power plants and industrial facilities there. The question is, with the vast majority of the pipeline capacity down Mexico’s East Coast already locked up, where will the Yucatán’s incremental gas come from? In today’s RBN blog, we discuss this potential disconnect between Mexico’s gas-related aspirations and reality.
Thursday, 2/08/2024
Category:
Renewables
The Biden administration has placed some big bets on clean hydrogen, seeing it as a replacement fuel for some hard-to-abate industries and putting it at the heart of its long-term decarbonization efforts. All of these bets are backed by a brand-new tax credit. But the goal isn’t just to drive production of more hydrogen — it’s also to make hydrogen in a specific way, with measurable decreases in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. That means producing hydrogen that qualifies for the tax credit is going to be a lot easier said than done. The proposed rules include a concept called deliverability — one of the “three pillars” of clean hydrogen — that adds further challenges to producers hoping to cash in on the tax credit and puts into further peril any number of potential projects. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll explain how deliverability works, how it fits into the proposed rules, and the challenges it will pose for hydrogen producers and power generators alike.
Wednesday, 2/07/2024
Category:
Refined Fuels
Fresh on the heels of expanding its Beaumont, TX, refinery into the largest in the country, ExxonMobil announced in January that it had finished yet another project at its century-old Baton Rouge complex in Louisiana. The Baton Rouge Refinery Integrated Competitiveness (BRRIC) project took roughly three years to complete and did not add crude refining capacity, unlike the Beaumont project. Instead, the goal of the $240 million investment was to modernize the crude oil processing plant — the state’s largest — increasing access to competitive crudes and growing markets for its fuels as well as curbing the refinery’s environmental impact. In today’s RBN blog, we take a closer look at the BRRIC project and what it means for the Baton Rouge refinery.
Tuesday, 2/06/2024
Category:
Natural Gas
So far this winter, front-month CME/NYMEX natural gas futures have fallen, risen and fallen again but, until their most recent dip, generally remained within the same $2.30-to-$3.30/MMBtu range where they have been lingering since mid-2023. With production sustaining near-record levels, LNG export volumes down from the winter highs, and temperatures back to normal, the supply of gas remains plentiful — a bearish scenario. In today’s RBN blog, we look at why there’s been a lid on natural gas prices — and the odds that the situation might change before the rapidly-approaching end of the winter season.
Monday, 2/05/2024
Category:
Financial
Brutal arctic cold may have chilled broad swaths of the U.S. last month, but the scorching pace of upstream M&A activity continued to be red hot, with nearly $20 billion in deals announced in January after a record-setting 2023. Last year’s transaction value totaled an astounding $192 billion, a mark 79% higher than the previous 10-year high and more than the previous three years combined. Why the surge? A wide range of factors influenced corporate decisions to grow through acquisitions rather than organic investment, including commodity prices, equity values, debt levels, operating costs, and production trends. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll analyze M&A trends through several statistical lenses and provide some insights into 2024 activity.
Friday, 2/02/2024
Category:
Natural Gas
Natural gas storage — especially well-sited storage with lightning-fast deliverability rates — is taking on a new significance (and value) as LNG export facilities and power generators seek to manage their often-volatile gas demand. But developing new gas storage capacity is costly and, with only a few exceptions, it’s hard to make an economic case for greenfield projects. That reality has spurred a lot of interest among midstream companies in acquiring existing storage assets and, where feasible, expanding that storage. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss one of the biggest storage-acquisition deals to date: Williams Companies’ recent purchase of six facilities with a combined working gas capacity of 115 Bcf in Louisiana and Mississippi. (It’s not all that Williams has been up to on the gas-storage front.)
Start Me Up - Biden Administration Using Billions to Kick Domestic Battery Production Into High Gear
Thursday, 2/01/2024
Category:
Renewables
If the U.S. is to significantly grow its production of electric vehicles (EVs), it’s going to need a robust domestic supply chain that includes critical metals and minerals. The Biden administration has previously provided billions in funding made available through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) to help establish new clean-energy industries, an approach it is repeating with EV battery manufacturing and its goal of having EVs account for half of all new-car sales by 2030. In today’s RBN blog, we look at the $3.5 billion set aside to fund investments in the EV battery supply chain and increase domestic manufacturing.
Wednesday, 1/31/2024
Category:
Natural Gas
There’s no doubt about it: The Biden administration’s decision to pause approval of LNG export licenses poses a new threat to a number of projects thought to be nearing a final investment decision (FID). The questions brought on by the move are profound: how big of a problem is this for U.S. developers, how does the timeout affect the projects now in limbo, and — over the longer term — what does the added uncertainty regarding incremental LNG exports mean for U.S. crude oil and natural gas production and what does it mean for the global energy landscape? In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the factors that led to the administration’s announcement — and the case to be made that expanded LNG exports are in the U.S.’s economic and strategic interest.
Tuesday, 1/30/2024
Category:
Crude Oil
When the Group of Seven (G-7) countries placed a $60/bbl cap on the price of Russian crude oil in December 2022 — one of many responses to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine — there were two primary goals. The first was to keep Russian barrels flowing to the market to help keep global prices in check, and the second was to slash the profitability of Russian oil exports and thereby reduce its ability to wage war against Ukraine. In today’s RBN blog, we look at how effective the sanctions have been and how Russia has tried to work around the price cap.
Monday, 1/29/2024
Category:
Natural Gas
The current winter heating season in Canada has seen extremes of warmth and cold, but much more of the former than the latter. Given that the Canadian natural gas market was already oversupplied and struggling with record-high gas storage levels as winter approached, even the most intense cold blast in mid-January wasn’t enough to return the supply/demand balance north of the 49th parallel to anything near normal. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss where the Canadian market stands as the calendar turns to February and what that might mean for end-of-winter gas balances.
Friday, 1/26/2024
Category:
Natural Gas
Big changes are coming to the new epicenter of the global LNG market: Texas and Louisiana. On top of the existing 12.5 Bcf/d of LNG export capacity in the two states, another 11+ Bcf/d of additional capacity is planned by 2028. The good news is that the two major supply basins that will feed this LNG demand — the Permian and the Haynesville — will be growing, but unfortunately not quite as fast as LNG exports beyond 2024. And there’s another complication, namely that the two basins are hundreds of miles from the coastal LNG terminals, meaning that we’ll need to see lots of incremental pipeline capacity developed to move gas to the water.
Thursday, 1/25/2024
Category:
Financial
A lot of energy-industry M&A activity lately has been focused on the acquiring company gaining scale in a shale play or region where it’s already very active, usually the Permian. The latest multibillion-dollar deal in the energy space is different: Sunoco LP (stock ticker symbol SUN), which is primarily involved in fuel distribution east of the Mississippi and in Texas, is buying NuStar Energy (ticker NS), a midstream company with a mix of pipelines (crude oil, products and ammonia) and terminals, most of them within the U.S.’s midsection. As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, the combined company will have a massive footprint, with all kinds of opportunities for synergies and growth.
Welcome to the Future - With Tier 3 Costs Sky-High, U.S. Refiners Consider Investments, Alternatives
Wednesday, 1/24/2024
Category:
Refined Fuels
When the price of the Tier 3 sulfur credit hit a new high of $3,600 in October 2023, the tradable sulfur credit for gasoline moved from the background to center stage in refining circles. And while credit prices have retreated slightly to about $3,400, they still represent a nearly 10-fold increase over two years and translate to a Tier 3 compliance cost of almost $3/bbl, raising concerns from refiners in a highly competitive market. In today’s RBN blog, we look at how refiners are adapting and the investments that could reduce the cost of compliance.
