conway

Crude-oil-focused production in the Bakken still hasn’t fully recovered from its pre-COVID high, partly because the western North Dakota shale play continues to face takeaway constraints, especially for natural gas and NGLs. A couple of NGL pipeline projects in the works will certainly help, but will they be enough to enable the Bakken’s increasingly consolidated E&P sector to ramp up its crude oil production? And one more thing: How will the incremental NGLs flowing south on Kinder Morgan’s soon-to-be-repurposed Double H Pipeline find their way to fractionation centers in Conway and Mont Belvieu? In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at the Bakken’s complicated production-vs.-takeaway conundrum and the ongoing efforts to address it. 

Mont Belvieu, TX and Conway, KS, are the two most significant U.S. hubs for NGL trading, storage and fractionation, with the much bigger Mont Belvieu hub primarily serving Gulf Coast and export demand, while the smaller Conway hub is focused on Midwest/Great Plains demand, especially for propane. The pricing dynamics between the two hubs are a key indicator of the supply/demand balance between the regions, but they don’t have the same kind of influence over the direction or magnitude of flows as price differential dynamics often do for other energy commodities. In today’s RBN blog, we will examine the gap between the price of the NGL “basket” in Mont Belvieu versus Conway and what that price spread tells us. 

The official start of propane heating season is only two months away, and inventories are skinny, pretty close to the five-year minimum. Should that be a concern? After all, stocks were at the low end of the range last year, and it was a relatively benign market, with few supply chain disruptions. But there’s a potential gotcha in that statement. Because last year the first three months of winter were quite mild in propane country. What would happen if the market were hit with weather events like what we saw during the “polar vortex” of 2013-14, a winter etched into the minds of all propaners who lived through it? Obviously, the outcome would be quite different.  In today’s RBN blog, we continue our series on the upcoming propane heating season with a look at the challenges that unusually cold weather could bring.

Over the past five years, the production of natural gas liquids from gas processing plants has soared by almost 2 million barrels per day (2 MMb/d), or about 60%. That has been great news for natural gas producers, processors, and end-use markets. But there is a catch: the rate of production does not match up with demand. While production is a steady, “ratable” volume, demand is anything but ratable. Demand swings with the gasoline blending season, cold weather (or lack thereof) in the propane market, export demand, petchem feedstock economics, the impact of COVID-19 on transportation fuels, and a myriad of other factors. The flywheel that balances supply and demand on any given day is storage. Not just any storage, though. For NGLs, storage of large volumes means salt caverns. Huge caverns thousands of feet below the surface. Today, we update one of RBN’s Greatest Hits blogs and take a deep dive into the history of NGL storage — all the way back to Smoky Billue.

Cold weather and spiking demand from Midwest and Great Plains farmers trying to dry their late-maturing, soggy crops have sent the PADD 2 propane market into a tizzy. Supply is not a major issue — propane inventory levels in the region are only a little below average, and stocks are plentiful along the Gulf Coast in PADD 3 — but distributing propane by rail and truck for crop-drying use has been a bigger-than-normal problem. As a result, farmers are scrambling to get more of the fuel, and propane prices in the U.S. heartland have been skyrocketing. Worse yet, Canada may not be able to come to the rescue as it has in the past, because its propane exports to Asia are up and its inventories are down. Today, we review recent developments on the fuel front in the nation’s breadbasket.

For a few days in late July, the price differential between propane stored at Enterprise Products Partners’ salt caverns in Mont Belvieu, TX, and propane stored at facilities owned by others a few hundred yards away quickly widened to as much as 10 cents/gallon. That’s by far the biggest spread of its type we can recall, and while we can’t say for certain what caused the “Enterprise-vs.-others” propane differential to blow out, there’s a likely — and familiar — culprit: NGL infrastructure constraints. Something else this unusual pricing event confirmed is that, no matter where the NGL storage, fractionation or pipeline constraint may occur, it almost always has an outsized effect on the much smaller NGL storage and fractionation hub in Conway, KS. What’s with that? Today, we look at the recent, rapid slide in propane prices at Enterprise’s Mont Belvieu storage facility and discuss what it tells us.

Two months ago, NGL prices and market differentials were soaring, in large part due to fractionation capacity constraints on the Gulf Coast at Mont Belvieu. The constraints have not eased, yet the same prices and differentials have come crashing down from those lofty levels. Why has this happened, you ask, and how long will it last? There are a lot of factors contributing, but two of the most significant are seasonal NGL demand shifts and what’s going on with crude oil. Today, we examine the recent swings in NGL prices and market differentials and what may be around the next corner for these markets.

To fire on all cylinders — especially during a period of strong high crude oil prices and rising production — the U.S. energy sector depends on midstream infrastructure networks that can efficiently handle the transportation and processing of every type of hydrocarbon that emerges from the wellhead. It’s no secret that rapid production growth in the Permian has left the red-hot West Texas play short of crude-oil pipeline capacity, and midstream companies there have also struggled to keep pace with natural gas takeaway needs too. What’s less well known is that fractionation capacity at the all-important NGL hub in Mont Belvieu, TX, is nearly maxed out, and that some Permian producers — and others — are now scrambling to find other places to send their incremental NGL barrels for fractionation into purity products. We put this issue front-and-center earlier this week in Hotel Fractionation.  Today, we discuss highlights from the first of two planned Drill Down Reports on fractionators and other key assets at the nation’s largest NGL hub, and the potentially broader effects of a fractionation-capacity shortfall.

Y-grade, welcome to the Hotel Fractionation. You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave!  OK, so that’s a bit of an overstatement. But there is no doubt that the U.S. NGL market has entered a period of disruption unlike anything seen in recent memory. Mont Belvieu fractionation capacity is, for all intents and purposes, maxed out. Production of purity NGL products is constrained to what can be fractionated, and with ethane demand ramping up alongside new petchem plants coming online, ethane prices are soaring. But that’s only a symptom of the problem. Production of y-grade — that mix of NGLs produced from gas processing plants — continues to increase in the Permian and around the country. Sooo … If you can’t fractionate any more y-grade, what happens to those incremental y-grade barrels being produced?  How much can the industry sock away in underground storage caverns?  Does it make economic sense to put large volumes of y-grade into storage if it will be years before it can be withdrawn? — i.e., “you can never leave.” And what happens if y-grade storage capacity fills up? Today, we begin a blog series to consider these issues and how they might impact not only NGL markets, but the markets for natural gas and crude oil as well.

For 10 years prior to 2018, the differential between propane prices at the Conway, KS, hub averaged less than a nickel per gallon below Mont Belvieu. In fact, between 2013 and 2017, the price spread was only 3.5 c/gal — excluding a winter 2014 Polar Vortex aberration — which basically reflects the cost of moving barrels 700 miles north-to-south. Not this year, though. After starting 2018 at 3 c/gal, the propane price spread took off, and has averaged 18 c/gal since April, some days moving above 26 c/gal, far above the per-bbl cost of transporting propane 700 miles south to Mont Belvieu. Is it pipeline capacity constraints? In part. But there is a much more significant factor driving this differential wider, not only in the propane market, but across all five of the NGL purity products. What is this mysterious factor? To find out, read on. But here’s your first clue: the problem is not in Kansas anymore.