The NGL business is one of the most logistically complex segments of the energy industry. To really make sense of it you need to step back and look at the big picture. That’s exactly what our new U.S. NGL Infrastructure Map provides — a comprehensive view of the entire NGL value chain.
The NGL business is one of the most logistically complex segments of the energy industry. To really make sense of it you need to step back and look at the big picture. That’s exactly what our new U.S. NGL Infrastructure Map provides — a comprehensive view of the entire NGL value chain.
It’s been about a year and a half since Next Wave Energy Partners opened its Project Traveler facility, a milestone in the energy industry. Overall, Project Traveler has exceeded production expectations and proven the innovative approach of combining ethylene and isobutane to produce high-quality alkylate. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at what’s been accomplished so far and dive into what’s ahead for Next Wave.
There’s always a risk when you take a new approach to doing or making something that your expectations won’t pan out — that something you hadn’t figured on happens and messes things up. But oh, the satisfaction that comes when the stars align exactly as you foresaw. The folks who developed Project Traveler, a recently completed Houston-area plant that produces high-value, octane-boosting alkylate from ethylene, isobutane and other widely available and low-cost feedstocks, know that good feeling, as we discuss in today’s RBN blog on the project’s economics.
Over the past nine months, the frac spread —a rough-cut measure of the value of extracting NGLs from raw gas at gas processing plants — has taken a terrifying plunge, from $9.82/MMBtu in early March to only $2.16/MMBtu on Monday. Given that the frac spread is the differential between the price of natural gas and the weighted average price of a typical barrel of NGLs on a dollars-per-MMBtu basis, a 78% nosedive like that suggests that something is seriously out of whack, and that at least some market players are taking a real hit financially. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the frac spread, the drivers behind its recent freefall, and what it would take for gas processing margins to rebound.
Since the mid-2010s, MPLX has been developing a far-reaching pipeline system for delivering heavier natural gas liquids and field condensate from the Utica and “wet” Marcellus plays to Midwest refineries for gasoline blending and refining, and to the Alberta oil sands for use as diluent. The multi-year, multi-project effort, which has involved the construction of new pipelines, the repurposing of existing pipes, and the development of new storage capacity, will reach another milestone next month, when MPLX starts batching normal butane and isobutane through most of the pipeline system. And further enhancements are on the horizon. Today, we provide an update on the master limited partnership’s long-running strategy for moving Marcellus/Utica-sourced liquids to market more efficiently and at a lower per-barrel cost.
There is no such thing as a typical NGL barrel. For example, the composition of y-grade production out of the Marcellus is significantly different from y-grade out of most of the Permian. And it is not just gas processing engineers who care. The make-up of an NGL barrel is inextricably linked to the value of that barrel. The reason is pretty simple: there’s a big difference in the value of each of the five NGL products. These days, natural gasoline is worth nearly eight times as much per gallon as ethane. Normal butane is worth 1.6X as much as propane. Consequently, the more natural gasoline and normal butane in your barrel versus the amounts of ethane and propane, the more the barrel is worth. So it’s important to anyone trying to follow the value added by gas processing and related infrastructure to understand where these numbers come from and how much the composition of a barrel can vary from basin to basin, or for that matter, from well to well. In Part 2 of our series on gas processing, we turn our attention to the variability in the mix of NGL production and its implication for processing uplift.
OK, we admit it. Our title may be a bit of an overstatement in early 2020, but it was absolutely true back in 2012, when the frac spread was $13/MMBtu. These days, the frac spread — the differential between the price of natural gas and the weighted average price of a typical barrel of NGLs on a dollars-per-Btu basis — is only $2.48/MMBtu as of yesterday. But with Henry Hub natural gas prices in the doghouse — they closed on February 11 at $1.79/MMBtu — getting $4.27/MMBtu for the NGLs extracted from that gas, or an uplift of 2.4x, is still a pretty darned good deal. And that’s Henry Hub. Natural gas prices are lower in all of the producing basins, and are likely headed back below zero in the Permian this summer. So even with NGL prices averaging 30% lower than last year, the value of NGLs relative to gas can be a big contributor to a producer’s bottom line — assuming, of course, that the producer has the contractual right to keep that uplift. Today, we begin a blog series to examine the value created by extracting NGLs from wellhead gas, including processing costs, transportation, fractionation, ethane rejection, margins, netbacks and the myriad of factors that make NGL markets tick. We will start with the frac spread — what it tells us in its simplest form, how we can improve the calculations so it can tell us more, and, just as important, the economic factors that the frac spread excludes.
For a few years now, the Shale Revolution has been opening up development opportunities hardly anyone would have thought possible in the Pre-Shale Era. For example, new crude oil, natural gas and NGL pipelines from the Permian to the Gulf Coast, lots of new fractionators and steam crackers, as well as export terminals for crude, LNG, LPG, ethane and, most recently, ethylene. And here’s another. Thanks to the combination of NGL production growth and new ethylene supply — plus increasing demand for alkylate, an octane-boosting gasoline blendstock — the developer of a novel ethylene-to-alkylate project along the Houston Ship Channel has reached a Final Investment Decision (FID). Today, we discuss how the FID is driven by both supply-side and demand-side trends in the NGL and fuels markets.
Energy markets are constantly changing, but pipelines can take years to complete, and once they’re in the ground, that’s where they stay. Therefore, it’s critical for midstream companies to build as much flexibility as possible into their plans for new pipelines and other infrastructure, because you never know what the markets for crude oil, natural gas, NGLs and refined products might have in store. Energy Transfer apparently has that flexibility in mind as it’s been building out its Mariner East pipeline system across Pennsylvania to the Marcus Hook Industrial Complex (MHIC) near Philadelphia. Today, we consider recent developments regarding these key midstream assets in the Northeast and their still-evolving uses.
