Backstage Pass

Well, thanks to you all, we reached another important milestone this week: 40,000 subscribers to RBN’s daily blog. We are quite proud of the achievement. That’s a lot of folks taking time out of their busy day to read a couple thousand words about what’s happening with oil, gas, NGLs and renewables — all in the context of a rock & roll song. We couldn’t have done it without you. Today, after posting a total of about 3,000 blogs over nearly 12 years, we pull back the curtain on the RBN blogosphere and discuss how and why it all happens — and how you help shape what we blog about. 

The oil price collapse has opened a wide rift between high quality “good” assets, breakeven “bad” assets, and ruinous “ugly” assets.  The consequences will impact energy markets for decades to come.  In our recently published Drill Down Report, we demonstrate the differences between good, bad and ugly wells by examining the diversity of production economics across the Eagle Ford basin and why producers have been zeroing in on the counties——and areas within those counties—where initial production (IP) rates are highest, and preferably where large volumes of associated natural gas and natural gas liquids can be found as well. Today we consider Eagle Ford counties in more depth—their IPs, their internal rates of return (IRRs), and the number of new-well permit applications in each county in the first quarter of 2016.

U.S. propane production growth in the shale era and the addition of new domestic and export terminal infrastructure has resulted in a radical transformation of the U.S. propane market. But even as the market responds to these positive developments, the memory of shortages and price spikes during the Polar Vortex winter of 2013-14 lingers. The market response since that crisis, and what further actions the industry might take to be better prepared for future market disruptions are the subjects of RBN’s latest Drill Down report reviewed in today’s blog (click here for a preview of the report: Next To You: A Transformation in Propane Markets).

Another round of big changes are coming to the markets for natural gas, natural gas liquids (NGLs) and crude oil. The surging production growth that has characterized these markets has slowed and in some basins is starting to fall as the mass exodus of drilling rigs begins to take its toll on shale production.  But what about all that infrastructure that has been and continues to be built?  Billions of dollars are going into pipelines, processing plants, petrochemical plants, terminals, storage, etc. based on a much higher production growth scenario than now seems likely.  Where are the opportunities in this new energy market reality? The answer depends on a discernable pattern of events tied to production volumes, infrastructure capacity, commodity flows and project expenditures. Those are the themes of our latest State of the Energy Markets Conference scheduled for October 28, 2015 in Denver, CO as well as the subject of today’s blog – also an advertorial for the conference.

Over the past 4 years, billions of dollars have been committed to building new petrochemical olefin crackers for ethane and export facilities for both propane and ethane. All these projects were expected to take advantage of booming domestic natural gas liquids (NGL) production. Projected returns on these investments were based on the assumption that global crude oil prices would remain high relative to domestic NGLs – providing competitive margins for U.S. petrochemical plants and attractive arbitrage opportunities in export markets.  The oil price crash in the latter half of 2014 has undermined that assumption and now threatens the economics of many of these projects. Today we preview the latest RBN Energy Drill Down Report addressing the consequences for NGL infrastructure of lower crude prices.

RBN has been in the blogging business for almost three years, and ever since we started these postings one of the most frequent complaints we’ve heard is that “It doesn’t work on my iPhone”.  Finally we are fixing that, and many more things too.  But as with anything new delivered by internet, there are some things you need to know.  So today is a blog about blogs, to make sure all of our members know what we are changing and how to take maximum advantage of our new website’s capabilities.

RBN Energy is branching out!  Today we are launching our new premium services package called Backstage Pass.  Just like it sounds, this new service gets you deep into the details of the data and models we put together at RBN, providing what we believe is a whole new level of information access, insights and connections across energy markets.  Don’t panic.  The blog is still free.  But if you are like the many RBN members that have asked for a much broader range of services, then you will be happy to learn that the answer is now ‘yes’.  We are rolling out the service with what we believe is the definitive study assessing the crude-by-rail phenomenon.  Learn everything you need to know about our new premium services in today’s blog.  But be warned, this is an unabashed commercial plug for our new service.  We hope you find it intriguing.