The global petrochemical is currently experiencing a downturn, and this is showing up in earnings. These companies are reacting with cost reductions and capacity rationalizations.
Californians love their cars. Be it a lemon-yellow Lamborghini whizzing around Los Angeles freeways or a Jeep cruising the Pacific Coast Highway, getting behind the wheel is not just about coming of age — it’s a life goal in the Golden State. California also typically has the costliest gasoline in the U.S. (except when Hawaii holds that title), exacerbated by occasional price spikes and supply squeezes. The state responded in 2023 with a new law — SB X1-2 — designed in part to increase gasoline price transparency and assess potential ways to ensure consistent and affordable supply. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll examine the California Energy Commission’s (CEC) first assessment of the law’s impact.
On average, the landowners and other entities that own mineral and royalty interests in producing oil and gas wells receive about 20% of the gross revenues generated by those wells — and do so without any responsibility for the significant costs and complications associated with well development and production. Mineral and royalty interests have traditionally been a highly fragmented market, with most held and passed down through generations by landowners or purchased by individual investors. However, competition for these interests has become more heated in recent years with the creation of large publicly owned and private-equity-funded consolidators and a new emphasis by E&P companies on adding these higher-margin slices of revenue from leases they own and operate. In today’s RBN blog, we explain mineral and royalty interests and analyze the developments in this massive $700 billion market.
U.S. refiners have been enjoying some very good times the past couple of years. Most important, refining margins have soared due to a tight global product supply/demand environment brought on by, among other things, the post-COVID demand recovery, refinery shutdowns, Russia/Ukraine war effects, and high natural gas prices. Traditionally, the bulk of refining margins have come from (1) robust “crack spreads” (the general yardstick for measuring overall refining sector health, simply by taking the difference between a basket of refined products and key light sweet crude markets like WTI Cushing or MEH) and (2) the lower crude-input costs that many refineries benefit from, either because of location-related advantages or their ability to process lower-cost crude like medium and heavy sours. But location discounts have narrowed in recent years due to the buildout of pipelines and, as we discuss in today’s RBN blog, the big quality discounts that complex refiners relished through much of last year and the first few months of 2023 have withered. The question is, why?
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.
