In The News

No easy fixes for California's isolated fuel market
Monday, 02/23/2015

February 19, 2015 – Reuters

No easy fixes for California's isolated fuel market

By Rory Carroll

Feb 19 (Reuters) - The explosion that shut a major Los Angeles oil refinery on Wednesday sent shockwaves through the local gasoline market, sparking higher prices, largely because California's fuel infrastructure is isolated by geography and environmental rules.

Despite the shortage of easy fixes for a state that is seeing fewer refineries provide gasoline for millions, analysts believe pump prices will remain steady due to healthy...

Read Article
RBN’s Braziel Sees Oil/Gas Market ‘Resilience’
Thursday, 02/05/2015

February 4, 2015 – NGI

RBN’s Braziel Sees Oil/Gas Market ‘Resilience’

By: Richard Nemec

While the recent rapid drop in crude oil prices has been likened to the price collapse of 1986, a rebound is not likely to take 14 years as the 80’s crash did, according to Rusty Braziel, a veteran of the oil and gas industry during that time.

“It’s not going to take 14 years, but it won’t be 14 months either,” Braziel, founder of the analysis and consulting firm RBN Energy.

“In terms of the futures market, prices are viewed to be...

Read Article
Sasol Shelves Plans for Louisiana Gas-to-Liquids Plant
Wednesday, 01/28/2015

January 28, 2015 – Wall Street Journal

Sasol Shelves Plans for Louisiana Gas-to-Liquids Plant

By Patrick McGroarty in Secunda, South Africa, and Alison Sider in Houston

South African energy giant Sasol Ltd. said Wednesday it was shelving an $11 billion factory on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, turning one of the largest prospective foreign investments on U.S. soil into another casualty of falling oil prices.

Sasol has spent years planning to expand its chemical factory outside Lake Charles, La into a sprawling...

Read Article
Energy Must Hold These Levels
Tuesday, 01/27/2015

January 26, 2015 – Real Money 

Energy Must Hold These Levels

By: Jim Cramer

Oil's pretty much got to hold $45 where it is right now -- or else. And natural gas must stay around $3, roughly its current price, or look out below. Those are the black magic levels where our homegrown shales become uneconomic to drill for most U.S. companies. Those are the make-or-break levels for this once-thriving industry.

This morning we got some pretty amazing aggregate drilling cost numbers from RBN Energy, by far the most authoritative site for...

Read Article
How Cheap Oil Changes Economics for Petchem Investors
Friday, 01/09/2015

January 7, 2014 – Energy Intelligence Finance, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1

“How Cheap Oil Changes Economics for Petchem Investors”

For the past five years, oil and chemical companies have been making multimillion and billion-dollar investments in new petrochemical plants and reopening and upgrading existing ones in the expectation that the price of natural gas would remain a small fraction of oil prices (EIF May14’14).

These investments have been made on the assumption that oil prices would forever be at least 20 times those of natural gas, if not more,...

Read Article

Pages