RBN Energy
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Friday, 10/03/2025
Thursday, 10/02/2025
In the early 2000s, prices for West Texas Intermediate (WTI) were becoming increasingly disconnected from global fundamentals. WTI reflected conditions in the Midcontinent at the Cushing, OK, crude oil storage hub, where bottlenecks repeatedly distorted its value. In today’s RBN blog, we look at how the problem contributed to the creation of the Argus Sour Crude Index (ASCI) 16 years ago, how the index has evolved and whether it remains relevant today.
Analyst Insights
Analyst Insights are unique perspectives provided by RBN analysts about energy markets developments. The Insights may cover a wide range of information, such as industry trends, fundamentals, competitive landscape, or other market rumblings. These Insights are designed to be bite-size but punchy analysis so that readers can stay abreast of the most important market changes.
By John Abeln - Thursday, 10/02/2025 (3:30 pm)
Report Highlight: NATGAS Appalachia
Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line was granted a crucial authorization last week, bringing the Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) one step closer to fruition. This project will allow the Williams Company pipeline to flow an incremental 400 MMcf/d to New York City and Long Island.
By Martin King - Thursday, 10/02/2025 (2:30 pm)
Waterborne crude oil exports from the expanded Trans Mountain Pipeline (TMX) averaged 453 Mb/d in September 2025 (rightmost stacked columns in chart below), a gain of 24 Mb/d versus August and an increase of 143 Mb/d from a year ago based on tanker tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.
Daily Energy Blog
Thursday, 4/05/2012
Category:
Crude Oil
About five weeks ago Bakken crude oil prices nose-dived almost $25/Bbl in a few days. In a posting titled A Perfect Storm in the Bakken we looked at the geography of flows through Clearbrook and Guernsey, the behavior of regional prices and the causes of the price crash. The graph below shows the prices at these two hubs versus WTI at Cushing with the period in question indicated by the blue dashed line.
Wednesday, 4/04/2012
Category:
Natural Gas Liquids
If you don’t have young teenagers (I don’t) and are not in the blogging business (I am), you might not be keeping up with the incredible number of internet/texting acronyms that have entered the ‘language’ over the past few years. One such acronym is NGL which of course stands for Not Gonna Lie. Any Google of a search term containing NGL brings up this definition and all sorts of other interesting hits. For your general edification I’ll be working some of these into the RBN blogs. That way you can use these terms to entertain your friends and look cool to your teenagers.
Sunday, 4/01/2012
Category:
Natural Gas Liquids
This is Part V of a series on the Golden Age of Natural Gas Processors. The first four parts reviewed the crude-to-gas ratio at 50X, the impact of increasing NGL production on prices, the uplift value provided by gas processing, and who gets all the money. Today we examine the incredible magnitude of gas processor’s margins – if the processor has access to the right gas streams.
Friday, 3/30/2012
Category:
Natural Gas
Thursday’s RBN post closed out with the prospect of bad news for gas price bulls if EIA storage came in with some number like +56 bcf when expectations were for +45. So the EIA build turned out to be one notch higher at +57 bcf. True to form, the CME/NYMEX May contract dropped like a rock. See the Updata Candlestick-Volume chart below that again tells the story.
Thursday, 3/29/2012
Category:
Natural Gas
Yesterday April Natgas rolled off the board closing with still another 10 year low, and the third official day of April bidweek wrapped up a weak trading session. Day-gas cash prices are in the dog house. It is EIA storage day, and a higher than expected build could be on the way. There is nothing about the natural gas market that looks bullish. Nevertheless, there has been no price collapse. In fact, natty has been range bound for weeks now. Do we know any more than we did two months ago? Let’s put the current situation in a historical perspective.
Wednesday, 3/28/2012
Category:
Crude Oil
Yesterday the folks at Raymond James issued a great research piece titled “Hell Brent and Gulf Coast Bound, WTI Discount's Here to Stay”. Got to love those RJ titles. We won’t get into their numbers or the details of their analysis, but three of their points I’ll summarize here.
Sunday, 3/25/2012
Category:
Natural Gas Liquids
This is Part IV of a multi-part series on the Golden Age of Natural Gas Processors. The first three parts covered the following topics:
- Part I – Crude-to-gas ratio; historical trends; Influence on natural gas processing; frac spreads
- Part II - Impact of increasing NGL production on prices, and how NGL markets are responding to the price changes.
- Part III - Uplift in value provided by natural gas processing at today’s prices – how the math works
Today we look at how much money natural gas plants make, who gets the money and what that means for both producers and processors.
Friday, 3/23/2012
Category:
Hydrocarbons
Yesterday the folks at RBC Capital Markets issued an excellent research piece titled “Cross-Sector Implications of North America Energy Supply Chain Evolution.” It is a look at the shale revolution from the perspective of a supply chain – the linkages between interconnected businesses involved in the development, extraction and production of liquid and gas hydrocarbon energy. The 31 page report makes some great points about the fundamentals of today’s hydrocarbon markets and recommends stocks that are expected to benefit from these developments. I thought it would be useful to summarize the high points of their investment thesis here. You’ll need to contact RBC if you want to see the report and its investment strategies.
Thursday, 3/22/2012
Category:
Natural Gas Liquids
In the previous posts of this series (Part I and Part II) we’ve looked at the relationship between NGLs and crude (weaker), the differences between the price performance of light and heavy NGLs (weaker vs. stronger) the frac spread for a typical plant (huge). Assuming we buy the logic that the crude-to-gas ratio will be this healthy for quite some time, what does that mean for the profitability of natural gas processing – how much value is created when wet natural gas is processed?
Tuesday, 3/20/2012
Category:
Natural Gas Liquids
This post continues yesterday’s review of the Golden Age of Natural Gas Processors, an analysis of the 50X crude-to-gas ratio on the economics of natural gas processing and the market for natural gas liquids. To fully understand this post, first see The Golden Age of Natural Gas Processors – NGLs in a 50X Crude-to-Gas Ratio World. Today we look at the impact of increasing NGL production on prices, and how NGL markets are responding to the price changes.
Sunday, 3/18/2012
Category:
Natural Gas Liquids
A long anticipated market milestone either has happened, is happening, or soon will happen. No I’m not talking about one-handle natural gas prices. That’s old news. The much more amazing number is a 50X crude-to-gas ratio. Whether it has happened yet or not depends on which prices you use to calculate the ratio. More on that below. But regardless of your math, one thing is certain. The value of extracting a hydrocarbon molecule in gaseous form and selling that molecule as a liquid has never been higher. It is a golden age of natural gas processing. It is a business that over the past two years (since March 2010) has experienced a decline in feedstock costs of more than 50% and an increase in its traditional measure of profitability – the frac spread –by +33%, from $9/MMbtu to almost $12/MMbtu.
Friday, 3/16/2012
Category:
Natural Gas
Yesterday was still another day of lower natural gas cash prices and whipsawing futures prices. ICE cash Henry Hub was at $2.0748/MMbtu, down 6 cnts. At one point weekend Henry Hub printed $1.98. TGP-Z4 Marcellus came down 8 cnts to $1.9440. April futures ran up again to $2.33 about 10:30 before coming off the rest of the day, closing at $2.279. We’ve talked a lot about production gluts and potential storage overruns over the past two days. Perhaps it is good time to step back and look at the big picture of U.S. natural gas supply and demand. And what better way to do that than with BENTEK numbers.
Thursday, 3/15/2012
Category:
Natural Gas
Yesterday we looked at Tuesday’s natural gas price 13cnt whipsaw and the apparent resistance to prices below $2.26 or so. I closed that blog with a commitment to look again at the fundamentals for oversupply, maxed out storage capacity and the impending collision of natural gas prices with reality (for background see Whip it, Whip it good). That’s what we’ll do today.
Wednesday, 3/14/2012
Category:
Industry
Friday, 3/09/2012
Category:
Crude Oil
They call it oil sands. It used to be called tar sands, but that was bad marketing. Regardless, it looks like dirt. Oily dirt. It is a mixture of sand, water, clay and petroleum – crude bitumen. Pronounced bich-oo-muhn. Even after it has been separated from the dirt and water, this bitumen is difficult to handle.