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.

(click on image to expand)

Before you jump to any conclusion that this stuff is incomprehensible, bear with us for a moment. This is a snapshot view designed for a quick glance, and only if you are familiar with the history of each series.  If you just click on any of the titles, it takes you to an expanded view of the six, with data on each graph going back a year.  You can see what that looks like below.