RBN’s Daily Energy Blog and Insights sharpen your energy IQ through fundamentals-based analysis that makes sense of North America’s energy market dynamics.
The U.S. can make a lot more ethane than it can consume. Producers are drilling for ‘wet’ shale gas, high in natural gas liquid (NGL) content – with ethane making up more than half of that NGL volume. Unfortunately there is not enough U.S.
While most of the country is enjoying the benefits that low cost North American supplies of natural gas bring to local and regional economies, many parts of the Northeast US and Atlantic Canada are still heavily reliant on expensive oil-based products for residential, commercial and industrial us
Next year (2014) RBN Energy expects Utica natural gas processing plants to produce 43 Mb/d of natural gasoline – more than 3 times 2013 production. Local demand will only soak up 17 Mb/d – leaving 26Mb/d needing transport to markets outside the region.
Midstream companies are expanding their infrastructure in Edmonton, Alberta. Kinder Morgan is adding over 5 MMBbl of storage at the origin terminal for its Trans Mountain pipeline to the West Coast.
The bases are loaded for another 2 MMb/d of pipeline capacity to bring additional crude supplies to the Texas Gulf Coast by the end of 2014. The majority of that payload will likely be light sweet crude from tight oil formations, a.k.a., shale.
Rusty’s Introduction
The hopes of Marcellus gas suppliers to move more of their product east are playing out in very different ways in metropolitan New York City and in New England.
Valero is the latest in a long line of US midstream companies to file their Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs) for an IPO – expected early in the New Year. These popular tax efficient entities were created over 25 years ago to encourage energy infrastructure investment.
Midstream infrastructure companies are investing heavily in facilities to gather, store and transport condensate and natural gasoline range materials in the Utica.
Throughout the three year-long disruption of the US crude oil distribution system caused by rising domestic and Canadian production trying to find a path through the Midwest, the Seaway pipeline reversal project has been a market bellwether of progress to unwind the congestion.
