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.
This week I am attending and speaking at the Platts North American Refining and Trading conference. This is without a doubt one of the most dynamic and confusing times in the refining business, with huge opportunities coming from shale and tight oil production colliding with regulatory unce
Overbuild!!! The word strikes at the heart of any midstreamer. Call it the curse of capacity. There is a shortage of capacity to do something, like transport crude oil, or store natural gas, or process ethane. You see the opportunity and jump on it, developing i
Sometimes learning is about getting your mind changed. Over the past couple of days at Bentek’s Benposium conference in Houston there were a lot of presentations and powerpoint slides looking at all sides of the LNG export issue. I’m still not convinced that we’ll see more than one te
Yesterday was Day#2 of Benposium, the annual Bentek conference being held at the Houstonian hotel in Houston. It was another day when I could attend the sessions as a participant, which is considerably harder work than it sounds. Between Tuesday and Wednesday there were seven outside
Yesterday was Day#1 of the annual Bentek energy analytics conference called Benposium, being held at the Houstonian hotel in Houston. I’m not speaking until Thursday so today was an opportunity to hang out and listen to some of the other presenters. The first two speakers focused on o
Last Thursday we looked at one side of the great 2012-18 ethane debate. Will we make too much of the stuff? Or not? Will the petrochemical industry have the capacity to chew up rapidly increasing ethane production.
Move over old dog ‘cause a new dog’s moving in. That dog would be crude oil from North America producers -- mostly light-sweet crude from the Bakken – moving by rail to Albany and on to other points east. Not only is it a good market for Bakken oil, it might just be the ticket out of
This is how midstreamers at the Platts conference talk about the Eagle Ford? Sounds more like a description of my wife’s Havanese after a bath than a description than one of the most prolific NGL plays on the continent. But these weren’t really complaints. It was just midstreame
Crude Oil TradeView provides up-to-date data and insights into the behavior of differentials for 33 crude assessments across North America. Each week, it also walks you through the reasoning of why differentials widen, narrow, flip (premium vs. discount), or blow out.
For the past two days I’ve attended the 5th Annual Platts Midstream Development Conference at the JW Marriott in Houston. After a while you start to get a little tired of phrases like ‘astronomical growth’, ‘unprecedented opportunities’, and ‘game changing technology’. There was a ste
Yesterday I attended and was a speaker at the 5th Annual Platts Midstream Development Conference at the JW Marriott in Houston.
