The energy industry is evolving rapidly, spun forward by a wide range of forces: a pandemic and its aftershocks, tensions with China, a land war in Europe and a push to decarbonize, to name just a few. What’s emerged in the last couple of years is an industry starkly different than the one that existed before. Every link in the value chain — from the producers upstream, to midstreamers, to the refiners and exporters downstream — has had to drastically adjust their strategies and, if anything, these changes have only intensified the connectivity across the markets for crude oil, natural gas, NGLs and refined products. It has underscored the need for industry participants to see and understand those links and how they impact their businesses. There’s a lot at stake. The energy industry of the mid-2020s — yes, we’re already in the middle third of the decade! — is vastly different, and so are the challenges, as we examine in today’s RBN blog.
Warning: Today’s blog is, in part, an advertorial for our upcoming School of Energy, which will be held in Houston in September.
Across the energy landscape, from oil to gas to NGLs to products (renewable fuels too!), commodities and markets are more interconnected than ever before. Domestic crude prices, which are top of mind for oil and gas firms planning future production, are joined at the hip to international markets through surging exports and a WTI now included in the international Brent benchmark. What happens in crude-focused production basins like the Permian will have far-reaching effects as growing volumes of associated natural gas flow through new processing plants and natural gas takeaway pipelines to Gulf Coast LNG export markets, which will see another stair-step up in capacity as early as next year.
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