Feedstocks

How can a business survive and thrive while spending $5.30 to make a product that sells for $1.90? That’s what’s happening in the booming renewable diesel (RD) market, where government subsidies allow RD to compete directly with petroleum diesel even though RD is inherently more costly to produce. But as new plants keep coming on stream, RD profit margins are coming under closer scrutiny. In today’s RBN blog, we analyze RD profit margins and show how they are changing as the market continues to expand. 

The boom in renewable diesel (RD) production has triggered a race to secure the dozen different bio-feedstocks suitable for refining into diesel fuel. It’s an interesting story that impacts both the oil and agriculture industries, with twists and turns that will take years to play out. In today's RBN blog, we describe the current state of the market and highlight recent happenings in supply chains for two of those increasingly important bio-feedstocks — soybean oil and used cooking oil. 

Predictions about what the energy market and the global economy might look like in the future can feel a bit like stargazing — the closer something is, the clearer it appears. But if something is really far away, even the Hubble Space Telescope won’t bring it precisely into view, especially if it’s a still-developing solar system or a distant planet. That’s pretty much where things stand with bioethylene, which could become a shooting star but might also end up as a big cloud of dust. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the developing market for bioethylene: where it’s being made, what changes might make it more economical to produce in the U.S., and its target markets.

Discussions about energy transition and increased electrification are all around us, whether they involve accelerating the ramp-up in renewable power sources such as wind and solar, facilitating the shift to electric vehicles, or switching to alternative fuels like hydrogen. But amid all the talk about the evolution to a low-carbon world — and away from oil and gas — there’s one area that is sometimes overlooked: petrochemicals. In the U.S., most steam crackers use natural gas liquids (NGLs) as their primary feedstocks, and they also consume a lot of energy — two big red flags in an increasingly ESG-focused world. And that’s giving bioethylene, billed as a green alternative to traditional ethylene, a moment in the spotlight. In today’s RBN blog, we look at how bioethylene is produced, how it differs from ethylene produced from traditional measures, and why it may someday evolve into an attractive alternative for the petrochemical industry, even though it’s far from a sure thing.

Energy markets balance — eventually. In the midst of the turmoil we’ve experienced this year, there have been periods when it seemed like markets were going to hit the wall. But even with the historic WTI oil price glitch on April 20, the physical crude oil markets continued to function. That’s the way it is supposed to work, and it’s good news. The bad news is that figuring out how these markets are balancing in these volatile conditions can be challenging if not downright perplexing. Nowhere is that more true than the market for U.S. propane. Production is down, but so is demand. Inventories are up, and so are prices. Propane continues to be exported, even though global demand has been whacked by COVID. In today’s blog, we explore these developments and put the spotlight on RBN’s NGL Voyager, our subscriber report and data service that we have just reformatted, upgraded and generally reconstructed to meet the information needs of today’s NGL marketplace.

The prospects for an ever-expanding boom in propane exports from the U.S. Gulf Coast are dimming, even as export volumes stand at near-record levels and as new export capacity continues to come online. Why? It comes down to supply and demand.  With oil and NGL prices at today’s levels, propane production is leveling off, not rising, and U.S. Gulf Coast domestic demand for propane will be increasing—from new propane dehydrogenation (PDH) plants and propane’s use in ethylene steam crackers—at the same time that export volumes out of the East Coast are quadrupling.  In today’s blog we consider the possibility that what goes up must come down.

Falling crude oil prices and other factors have crushed margins in the steam cracker/olefin unit segment of the petrochemical industry.   Margins per pound of ethylene have declined from more than 60 c/lb in October 2014 to less than 20 c/lb today (November 2015) for NGL feedstocks, including ethane.  We expect some petrochemical companies might be feeling a chill in the air.  That’s because five new Gulf Coast world scale steam crackers and a couple of smaller units are under construction or being developed to add still another 20 billion/lbs of capacity by the end of 2018.    In today’s blog, we assess NGL feedstock margin declines.

On September 19, 2014, the operating margin for a representative Gulf Coast steam cracker running ethane hit a record high – an astonishing 70.4 cents per pound.  Steam cracker margins depend not only on the spread between feedstock costs and the market price of ethylene but also on the varying amounts of propylene, butadiene and other byproducts that result from using different feedstocks. Understanding steam cracker profitability in the context of recent market developments is critically important, and it is the subject of RBN’s latest Drill-Down Report. In today’s blog we provide highlights of the report, which examines what is behind the ongoing shift from heavier to lighter NGL feedstocks, unveils RBN’s downloadable Steam Cracker Feedstock Selection Model, and discusses how new U.S. cracker capacity, NGL exports and other factors will impact these markets.