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.
Increasing production of naphtha range material such as condensates and natural gasoline in the southeastern Ohio section of the Utica shale will soon exceed the capacity of local refineries to process such light hydrocarbons.
Finding a home for growing condensate range material being produced in the Ohio Utica shale play involves local refinery deliveries as well as new transport routes to markets outside the region as far away as Canada.
Crude oil and diluent pipelines running through the two largest Canadian marketing and transportation hubs at Hardisty and Edmonton in Alberta have current capacity of 3.9 MMb/d. That will double to 8 MMb/d by 2018 if currently planned projects are completed.
We estimate that over 4 MMb/d of new crude transportation capacity will have opened up to the Texas Gulf Coast by the end of 2015 – to a region with just under 3.7 MMb/d of nameplate refining capacity.
Owning a refinery in the middle of the fastest growing shale crude basin sounds like a good idea. Calumet Specialty Products LP thinks so – they purchased the 14.5 Mb/d San Antonio refinery in December 2012 located at the heart of the Eagle Ford.
The second release of the EIA’s new monthly Drilling Productivity Report (DPR) for November came out on Tuesday (November 12, 2013) showing December natural gas production is expected to increase in four of the six regions covered.
The potential for the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale (TMS) tight-oil play to become the next big thing in U.S. oil production is attracting exploration and production companies willing to put some money at risk in the hope of big payoffs. The TMS seems to have a lot going for it.
Recent third quarter earnings reports from US refiners have reflected lower refining margins squeezed by higher feedstock prices for inland crudes like West Texas Intermediate (WTI) rising to the same level as coastal crudes like Light Louisiana Sweet (LLS) while product prices stood still.
NATGAS Billboard is a daily, early morning email and report that provides an up-to-the-minute view of the natural gas market outlook, including storage injections/withdrawals and price. Billboard’s models incorporate pipeline flow data, weather models, electricity demand data and more.
Corn drying in the Midwest is finally wrapping up, but farmers and grain elevators are still short of propane supplies even after emergency orders were imposed by several Midwestern governors.
Forty percent of the world’s fuel oil - the residual oil left over after extracting lighter products from crude oil - is used as bunker oil to power Ocean going vessels. Much of that fuel has relatively high sulfur content.
