Go Your Own Way – The Top 10 RBN Blogs of 2025

What it takes to get energy from Point A to Point B — from where it is produced to where it is consumed — was at the heart of many of RBN’s most popular blogs in 2025. Infrastructure bottlenecks, shifting logistics, evolving price signals, and the constant push-and-pull between supply and demand all shaped the markets, with each segment seemingly wanting to go its own way. But there was another layer too: the three T’s that hovered over everything this year: Trump, tariffs and turbulence. Together, they formed the backdrop for a market that kept everyone guessing about where things were headed. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the Top 10 blogs of 2025.

Fortunately, in the RBN blogosphere, we have a great way to size up what’s coming next — the blogosphere itself. A huge advantage of publishing a daily blog on a single topic — and distributing it to tens of thousands — is that by tracking how many hits each post gets, we can spot emerging energy-market themes as they develop. And we share those insights with the RBN community. For more than a decade, we’ve wrapped up each year by reviewing which topics rose to the top of the hit parade in our year-end “Top 10” blog, distilling the common themes we learn from what amounts to crowd-sourced market intelligence. Today’s blog is the latest edition of that tradition.

Just like any year-end Top 10 list, we’ll start with #10 and work our way up to #1.

Here are the Top 10 blogs of 2025 

(in reverse order, by number of website hits):

#10 – 8/14/2025 – Natural Gas: Helter Skelter - Wave of LNG FIDs and Data Center Mania Spur a Flood of Gas Pipeline Projects

In mid-2025, natural gas infrastructure development in Texas and Louisiana was surging. LNG developers had taken FID on more than 16 Bcf/d of new export capacity, the tech sector was rolling out multibillion-dollar data center campuses requiring several Bcf/d of new gas-fired power, and midstreamers were racing to advance a raft of multi-Bcf/d pipelines from the Permian and Haynesville. This blog sorted through the chaos, using RBN’s Arrow Model to map the sprawling mix of LNG terminals, FID’ed pipes, and other projects needed to keep pace with runaway demand and showed why the Gulf Coast will require much more capacity before the decade is out.

#9 – 8/18/2025 – Crude Oil: The Race Is On - The Efforts to Develop More Crude Oil Pipeline Capacity From Alberta to Cushing

Western Canadian heavy crude production keeps increasing, and with PADD 2 (Midwest) refineries already near their limits of heavy crude runs, the industry is scrambling to carve out more direct and efficient pathways from Alberta to Cushing and the Gulf Coast. This blog dug into Enbridge’s multibillion-dollar optimization plans for the Mainline, Express and Platte systems — including a potential Express/Platte-to-Flanagan South route and new interconnections — as well as competing concepts that could form a Keystone-XL-Lite network through the Rockies and Great Plains. Since this blog was posted, Enbridge, Bridger, Energy Transfer and others have announced projects that can deliver more Canadian crude to U.S. refiners.

#8 – 9/8/2025 – Refined Fuels: Go West - ONEOK Launches Open Season for Proposed Refined Products Pipeline to Phoenix

Arizona’s fast-rising jet fuel needs, shrinking Southern California refining output, and PADD 2/3 refiners’ push for premium Western markets converged in ONEOK’s proposal for the Sun Belt Connector, a new El Paso-to-Phoenix refined products pipeline designed to open the door for higher east-to-west flows. This blog walked through how ONEOK’s transformed asset portfolio — post-Magellan, Medallion and EnLink acquisitions — helped position the company to move more barrels westward and why the project could meaningfully reduce Arizona’s reliance on California supplies. In the months that followed, the competitive landscape intensified, with Phillips 66/Kinder Morgan advancing their Western Gateway concept and HF Sinclair considering expansions across the Rockies and West Coast, setting up a full-on race to reshape refined products supply routes across the West.

#7 – 1/8/2025 – Natural Gas Liquids: Let's Work Together - The Backstory Behind Phillips 66's $2.2 Billion Plan to Acquire EPIC NGL

This blog unpacked how Phillips 66’s $2.2 billion move to buy the EPIC NGL system was far more than a routine expansion of its well-to-market strategy, tracing the origins of EPIC’s Permian-to-Corpus concept, the hurdles it faced during development, and the competitive pressure that reshaped the system’s trajectory. We explained how EPIC NGL evolved through market swings, COVID-era disruption, joint-interest arrangements, and fractionation and purity-product buildouts — all of which ultimately made it an ideal fit for P66’s growing Gulf Coast NGL network. In the end, the deal marked a major step toward creating the first truly viable alternative to Mont Belvieu for large-scale NGL handling and exports.

#6 – 1/2/2025 – Crude Oil: Both Sides Now - Has the Trans Mountain Expansion Shifted Western Canada’s Crude Oil Exports?

The startup of the 590-Mb/d Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) in mid-2024 immediately began to reshape Western Canada’s crude export patterns, with far more heavy barrels sailing directly from British Columbia and fewer re-exports of Canadian barrels from the Gulf Coast. In the months that followed this early 2025 blog, TMX’s influence has only strengthened: Waterborne exports climbed to near-record levels, China became the dominant buyer of Canadian West Coast exports, and system utilization pushed into the 90% range. Together, these shifts mark a major rebalancing of Canada’s crude export options, with both the West Coast and Gulf Coast now functioning as large-scale, competitive pathways for Canadian barrels.

#5 – 4/9/2025 – Natural Gas Liquids: Bad Blood - Burgeoning U.S.-China Trade War Has Potential to Devastate Propane, Ethane Markets

Escalating U.S.-China tariff volleys and port fee salvos through the first few months of the year — sweeping propane, ethane and other energy commodities into the crossfire — temporarily upended the global NGL trade, threatened to crush PDH (propane dehydrogenation) and ethane-cracker economics in China, and depressed U.S. NGL prices as exports came under severe pressure. Most of the major tariff and port-fee measures were ultimately paused or rescinded following late-year negotiations, helping stabilize LPG and ethane trade flows after months of market-rattling uncertainty.

#4 – 3/31/2025 – Natural Gas: All Shook Up - New Natural Gas Pipes and LNG Terminals Shake Up Texas/Louisiana Gulf Coast

With nearly 12 Bcf/d of new pipeline capacity and more than 8 Bcf/d of LNG demand planned to come online by 2027, Texas and Louisiana were (and still are) facing a period of volatile, lopsided flows that will push gas west-to-east, north-to-south, and back again — market conditions every bit as disorderly as what we later explored in #10 above (Helter Skelter). This early-year Arrow Model blog showed how RBN’s corridor-based framework untangles that chaos, forecasting when (and why) flows flip direction, which hubs come under basis pressure, and how new pipes like Matterhorn, Blackcomb, Hugh Brinson and Trident interact with LNG expansions at Corpus Christi, Golden Pass, Plaquemines and Rio Grande. 

#3 – 9/15/2025 – Power: God Blessed Texas - Proposed Data Centers in Texas Would Be Enormous, But How Many Will Be Built?

No topic generated more market buzz in 2025 than AI and the prospects for massive data center power loads that could reshape gas demand. This blog laid out just how big the pipeline of proposed projects has become in Texas — gigawatts of potential load, gas demand to fire much of it, and a roster of hyperscale campuses from Laredo to the Metroplex to Central Texas. By walking through the largest projects, we showed that while the headline numbers are staggering, many sites still face major hurdles on power supply, permitting and financing. Even so, the direction is clear: AI-driven load growth is poised to become a material new source of natural gas demand in Texas, a theme that ran through many RBN blogs this year.

#2 – 4/2/2025 – Natural Gas: Already Gone - Is the Permian Basin Already Out of Natural Gas Takeaway Capacity?

Despite the early boost from Matterhorn Express, the new 2.5-Bcf/d greenfield pipeline moving Permian gas east toward Katy, the Waha Hub spent much of 2025 mired in negative pricing territory as even minor maintenance exposed how little effective takeaway capacity the basin really had. This blog showed that downstream constraints and gas quality issues were limiting flows, and producers were once again slamming into the same bottlenecks that drove last year’s low Waha basis. With pipeline outages later pushing Waha to all-time lows near minus $9/MMBtu — and no meaningful new capacity arriving until late 2026 — the message was unmistakable: Waha pain isn’t over, and the basin will remain under severe pressure for many months to come.

And the #1 blog of the year? First, a word from your sponsor.

Which is RBN, of course. 

#1 – 8/4/2025 – Crude Oil: Take the Long Way Home - Enbridge's Oil Pipeline Expansions Likely to Spur More Projects Downstream

Rising Western Canadian crude production and Enbridge’s push to add nearly 400 Mb/d of new Mainline and Express-Platte capacity set up a critical downstream question in 2025: How will all those incremental heavy barrels get from the Canadian border to the Gulf Coast? Building on the themes in #9 (The Race Is On), this blog showed why Canadian flows, export routes and midstream competition are key considerations for the oil markets and why they were among the year’s defining storylines — and that accommodating new north-to-south volumes will require a new generation of pipeline expansions. With another takeaway crunch looming over the next couple of years, Western Canadian crude flows will remain a major driver of midstream development.

Deeper Meaning from the Top 10

Each year to wrap up the Top 10, we try to discern a unifying theme across our most popular blogs, and as usual, we laid it out in the opening paragraph: the challenges of getting energy from Point A to Point B. As we’ve covered in the RBN blogosphere, much of 2025 was shaped by the competition among molecules, markets and infrastructure — crude barrels surging south from Canada, Permian gas fighting for a way out, LNG and data-center loads reshaping Gulf Coast gas flows, and refined-products and NGL systems racing to keep up. Whether the challenge was pipeline bottlenecks, price blowouts, geopolitical turmoil or the scale of AI-driven electricity demand, each blog pointed to the same conclusion: Energy markets are being rewired faster than ever, and the path from A to B is anything but straight. That’s why we track these themes day by day — because the signals buried in today’s flows, spreads and project announcements are the best clues to where tomorrow’s markets are headed.

FYI, if you were wondering. For the first time, we used AI, in this case ChatGPT, to help with the Top 10 summaries above. AI got it about 80% right, but 20% needed human fixing. 

And now it’s time to shift our focus forward and take another look into the crystal ball. In our next blog, Part 1 of The Top 10 Energy Prognostications for 2026: Year of the Horse, we’ll review how our predictions for 2025 panned out. Then, in Part 2, we’ll lay out our forecasts for the year ahead. Looking forward to next year, the Chinese calendar tells us that the horse is strong, proud and fast. Hopefully, those Chinese calendar makers are right about this one.

Happy New Year!

We hope our 2025 blogs have been useful to you. We are always open to suggestions (and song titles), so if you have ideas for topics we should cover or songs for us to riff on, please fire them off to [email protected]. Have a happy, safe and healthy New Year’s holiday.