Midwest Crop Drying Crisis

We’ve done several blogs over the past months about the impact of the back-to-back crop drying and Polar Vortex anomalies on natural gas liquids (NGL) prices in general and propane prices in particular.  Today we are going to take a walk further downstream and look at how increasing propane exports, the weather related anomalies and subsequent price spikes shifted the petrochemical feedstock slate.    From mid-year 2013 to early 2014, huge volumes of propane were backed out of the petrochemical sector, replaced for the most part by ethane.  These swings have important implications for the future consumption of NGL feedstocks by petchems.  In today’s blog, we assess petrochemical feedstock switching in the 2013-14 timeframe, and beyond.