Mont Belvieu Ethane Prices Rally

That crazy little ethane molecule is at it again. Yesterday the price blasted to 67.875 c/gal, a level last seen on January 17, 2012. Petchem cracker margins are low. Production is up, but inventories are down. A big driver of the bedlam is the price of natural gas, trading in the $7-$9/MMBtu range for the past month. But as usual with ethane, there’s a lot more happening below the surface — including high domestic demand, growing export volumes, and significant developments in downstream petrochemical markets — all shaking things up. Looking ahead, uncertainty looms, with more export capacity, ever-changing ethane rejection economics, and uneven production growth. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll leap back into the ethane market to see what’s been going on, and where ethane is headed over the next few years.

Propane prices at Mont Belvieu soared above $1/gallon on Wednesday — the first time that’s happened in the month of June since 2014. This buck-and-change price doesn’t come as much of a surprise for industry insiders, however. U.S. propane inventories have been very skinny lately, sitting at 56.2 MMbbl — or only 587 Mbbl above the five-year minimum based on yesterday’s EIA data. At the same time, propane exports have been riding high, averaging 1.3 MMb/d so far this year, up nearly 90 Mb/d from the same time frame in 2020, while production has remained virtually flat over the past 18 months. Surprise or not, the spike past $1/gal raises an important question: How high will U.S. propane prices have to go before exports are reined in so U.S. inventories can increase? Today, we discuss the key drivers behind the current price level and our propane market outlook for the second half of the year.

Ethane has been in the doghouse for years since the shale gas boom kicked in, with production greatly exceeding demand and hundreds of thousands of barrels per day being “rejected” into the natural gas stream – owing to the fact that netbacks for liquid ethane are lower than pipeline natural gas. One way to understand that relationship is to track the price ratio of ethane at Mont Belvieu, TX to natural gas at Henry Hub, compared on a BTU basis.  That ratio of ethane-to-gas languished at 95% between Q1 2014 through the summer of this year, and in November 2014 dipped to only 61%.  That means that the BTU value of ethane at that point was only 61% of natural gas. Ethane that cheap is an awesome value for steam crackers using the feedstock to produce ethylene and other petrochemicals.  But a couple of months ago (September 2015), the price of ethane started to ramp up relative to gas, blasting through 140% in late October.  Is that bad news for future ethane prices? What does that portend for ethane once all the new steam crackers being built come online and overseas exports – also coming soon -- ramp up.  Today we look at the recent rebound in the ratio of ethane to natural gas and consider whether this is a signal that ethane is out of the doghouse.