Virtual School of Energy

No one could’ve seen the energy market disruptions of 2020 coming, and most of us are ready to write off what has been one of the most challenging years the industry has seen in a long time. Yet the events of the past year will most certainly define what unfolds in the New Year and beyond. To make sense of what 2020 will mean for the post-COVID era, we retooled and refreshed our models and forecasts to tackle the hard questions facing U.S. crude oil, natural gas, and NGL markets. As it turns out, beyond the immediate chaos of the pandemic, there is a new order taking shape, and that’s what we laid out in the RBN Fall Virtual School of Energy, sharing our results and the Excel spreadsheets behind the models to get you ready for what’s coming. Some of what we expected has come to fruition, and we still think that there is a pretty good chance that the rest will unfold in the months and years ahead. If you weren’t able to join us for the live broadcast, we invite you to sit by the fire, put your feet up and dig in over the holidays. The entire 14+ hours of streaming content, plus slide decks and spreadsheets, are available online. Today’s advertorial blog provides highlights from our key findings and the overall conference curriculum.

In an energy market filled with incalculable uncertainty, it is no surprise that most of the focus is on the short term: production shut-ins, collapsing demand, refinery unit shutdowns, ballooning storage inventories and continually weakening prices. But even in the face of such dire circumstances in the weeks just ahead, there remains a cautious optimism — relatively speaking — for the resumption of some kind of new normal on the other side of COVID. You can see that expectation in the numbers, with the WTI May 2020 contract settling on Friday at $18.27/bbl, but the May 2021 contract up to $35.52/bbl. Granted, that May 2021 price would have been catastrophic if viewed in January 2020, but now it’s a bullish 95% increase over the front month.  It is that shift in perspective that underlies the fundamentals content that we developed for our two-day Spring 2020 Virtual School of Energy, held last week in the cloud: how things were viewed BEFORE the meltdown, and how things look AFTER — over the next five years. Did you miss the conference? Not to worry. The entire 14 hours of content are available online in our encore edition. It’s almost like being there! Today’s advertorial blog reviews some of the most important findings we covered at School of Energy and summarizes our overall virtual conference curriculum.

Throw out your old production forecasts. Delete your pricing model spreadsheets. Push out the dates on your infrastructure project timelines. Or kill the projects all together. We’ve got a black swan on our hands here, folks. Perhaps a flock of black swans. And while we may see something like normal again in a few months, there is little doubt that it will be an entirely new normal. How do we even think through the wrenching transformations that are working through energy markets? At RBN, we don’t have any more answers than anyone else, but we do have a structured approach to market analysis supported by a set of spreadsheet models that are the core of our School of Energy, scheduled for April 14-15. We think that’s exactly the kind of approach necessary to make sense out of this volatile and chaotic market. And although we have cancelled the in-person conference, we’ve made the decision to GO VIRTUAL! Today, we explain our decision to move forward with the virtual School of Energy and discuss the new material we are incorporating into the curriculum to address today’s market realities.