RBN

We can’t conjure up a more old-school, more intrinsically American industry than whiskey-making, or more iconic whiskey names than Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam — the latter, of course, being a bourbon, a particular type of whiskey. The recipes for both “Jack” and “Jim” have remained unchanged for generations and their distillers in Tennessee and Kentucky, respectively, are traditionalists to their core. That doesn’t mean, though, that they’re unaware of the need to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — or are blind to the opportunities that decarbonization may present. Now, as we discuss in today’s RBN blog, both Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam are all-in on producing renewable natural gas (RNG) from spent grains.

It’s time!   Registration for RBN’s *Summer* School of Energy is open.  Once again RBN Energy is offering an intense curriculum of energy market fundamentals analysis covering the whys and hows of the most important developments in the crude oil, natural gas and NGL markets.  This time the course is hot.  Really hot.  Because we are holding the conference in the middle of July in Houston.  And we’ve expanded the content to include an optional Preschool that consists of a half-day deep dive into the (hot) condensate markets, and another half day for a tour of (very hot) Mont Belvieu.   There is more - much more that we’ll review below.  And BTW, if this sounds like an unabashed commercial for our conference, that’s because it is.  You have been warned!

Last week we held the first RBN School of Energy at the St. Regis hotel in Houston.  Based on the feedback we received it was a huge success, achieving the goals we laid out for the conference.  Today we’ll report on the conference itself, and review some of the most important points covered in the curriculum.  Warning, this blog could (and should) be considered an advertorial, so read at your own risk.

During 2012 we’ve posted over 200 RBN blogs, covering everything from ethylene cracker margins (Ethylene Ethylene, Prettiest margin I ever seen), to northeast natural gas basis (The Mighty Algonquin) to the impact of a major crude pipeline reversal (Oh-Ho-Ho it’s Magic).  Now in our last posting of the year it seems appropriate to take a page out of Casey Kasem’s playbook to look back at the top blogs of 2012 based on website hits.  And there’s more!  In response to many members who have asked, we’ll also provide an index of all of our blogs by topic.  And finally we will introduce a new website feature that will give you the ability to see what is trending on the RBN site in real time.  BTW, we are not really going to look at 40 blogs.  After all it is New Year’s Eve.  But we will look a few of the really big winners for 2012.

Fundamental to our approach to energy markets at RBN is a view that natural gas, crude oil and NGLs have become much more interdependent than in the days before shale.  What happens in gas impacts NGLs, which influences crude oil, which loops back to the natural gas market.  We’ve written about these cross-commodity relationships in a number of RBN blogs during 2012, showing the calculations and walking through several spreadsheet models.  Now we are taking our analysis one step further.  Starting on December 31, 2012, we are launching a new RBN website feature called Spotcheck that displays daily updated graphs of these relationships.  Today we’ll describe what is coming next week, and how you can interpret the trends to better understand developments in North America hydrocarbon markets.