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New pipelines are coming online to deliver increasing volumes of US and Canadian production to market. Producers want to be paid full value for the quality of the crude that leaves their wellhead. Yet many pipelines blend different shippers’ crude into a common stream. To compensate for any loss of value en route, pipelines operate quality banks. These systems calculate payments or debits for each shipper based on their input crude quality versus the common stream. Today we look at crude quality banks that determine value using refined products.

Yesterday we learned that Gulf Coast diesel cracks (margins over crude) averaged $12.88/Bbl since August 2010 (read it here if you missed it). The result has been a Gulf Coast diesel-refining boom. Diesel production to feed this boom comes from refining conventional domestic and imported crude supplies that currently feed Gulf Coast refineries. Today we discover how new supplies of unconventional shale crude will force Gulf Coast refineries that process these light sweet crudes to kick their diesel crack habit. 

Refiners ultimately determine crude price values. Refining margins vary by location, crude quality, product prices and refinery configuration. Today we return to the Bakken to conclude our series: The Bakken Buck Starts Here – Bakken Crude Pricing Part IV - to discover that a longer journey to market might just be the most profitable.

In just over a month, purity ethane prices in Mont Belvieu are off 41%, falling from 50 cnts/gal on 4/30 to 29 cnts/gal on Friday, 6/8.  During the same period, non-TET propane was down 35% from 116 cnts/gal to 75 cnts/gal (see left graph, below).  Last week when we looked at petrochemical feedstock economics, propane was the preferred feedstock for the first time in years.  But a couple of days later that relationship flipped back to ethane.   At first glance, that seems strange.  Both ethane and propane increased during the first half of the week, then came back off (see right graph).  But feedstock economics went from favoring propane by more than a nickel per pound of ethylene to favoring ethane by just over a penny on Friday.  To understand how and why this shift happened we’ll need to break out the spreadsheets again.

Last week the price of ethylene dropped from the low 50s per pound down to the low 40s. In a big flip-flop, propane has been the preferred feedstock for petrochemical plants on the Gulf Coast for a couple of weeks now (it had been ethane for the most part of the last 3+ years).  And the petchem market hit ethane where it hurts, whacking the price down to 29.875 cnts/gal on Friday according to OPIS.  A month ago that price was 50 cnts/gal. In October of last year the price was almost $1.00 (see graph below).  This is good news for petchems, right?  Well, it all depends on the margin that the petchem realizes on the feedstocks that are run.  So to figure that out, let’s get to Part III of our series on the economics of petrochemical feedstocks.