John Zanner

In the U.S., crude oil trading hubs like Houston, Midland and Cushing get the lion’s share of the market’s attention. But travel a bit further north and you can find one of the more unusual and liquid crude markets in the country — Guernsey, WY — a focal point for producers in Western Canada, North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. Over the last few months, Guernsey differentials have tightened significantly, finally flipping to a premium to Cushing. We have seen this phenomenon occur before, most notably seven years ago after the startup of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). In today’s RBN blog, we discuss the recent movement in Guernsey differentials and what the future could hold for the often-overlooked sales point. 

Crude oil trading dynamics in West Texas and along the Texas Gulf Coast have experienced a whirlwind of change. Permian production was skyrocketing in 2018, but has now started to slow. It seemed for a time that crude takeaway pipeline capacity wouldn’t get built fast enough; now it looks like we’ll have far too much too soon. And along the coast, the once-overlooked Port of Corpus Christi is quickly becoming the epicenter of export activity, overtaking Houston, Beaumont and Louisiana — sometimes all three combined — for most volume moved on a monthly basis. With new export terminals coming online and increased connectivity, Corpus appears poised to continue its recent string of record-setting export numbers. In today’s blog, we review some recent breakthroughs in Corpus cargoes and shine a light on the new terminals in the area.

The battle for pipeline supremacy in the Permian is really heating up. From Cactus II, to EPIC, to Gray Oak, to a bevy of upcoming expansions and a couple of longer-term behemoth greenfield projects, there are multiple new takeaway options for Permian producers. But could it all be coming online at the wrong time? If there’s one thing we’ve learned from third-quarter earnings calls and recent conversations with producers, it’s that balance-sheet management and fiscal conservativism are top of mind right now. As a result, drilling plans and production growth expectations have been tamped down considerably for 2020 and beyond. Midstreamers and pipeline companies in the Permian are responding quickly. Tariffs are being slashed, margins are getting cut, and competition for West Texas barrels is fierce. Today, we look at recent developments and what they’ll mean for revenues and market differentials heading into the New Year.

A little over a year ago, we discussed the rapidly expanding third-party shipper market for crude oil in West Texas. At the time, crude at Midland was trading at nearly a $15/bbl discount to Gulf Coast markets. Pipeline space out of the Permian was hard to come by and extremely valuable, and everybody and their brother — literally, in some cases — were forming a limited liability corporation and trying to secure space as a walk-up, “lottery” shipper. A lot of people made a lot of money, but now, just over a year later, much of that lottery opportunity has dried up. Nowadays, these same folks are looking for new opportunities, or going back to old strategies, only to find that being a third-party shipper today is more expensive and more burdensome. In today’s blog, we recap how lottery shippers made buckets of money in late 2018 and early 2019, only to see their target of opportunity dry up due to midstream investment.

They are unsung heroes, the guys and gals who get in early, stay late, and are usually working odd hours on the weekends. They resolve issues before they arise, solve complex problems when they do pop up, and are always working the phones to get the next hot piece of intel. No, we’re not talking about the new cast from Season 2 of “Jack Ryan,” and no, it’s not the kids from “Stranger Things.” The keyboard warriors we’re referring to are crude oil schedulers. They’re at the forefront of the daily logistics taking place at truck injection points, gathering systems, and takeaway pipelines from Western Canada down to the Gulf Coast (and around the rest of the world as well). As more and more new pipelines get built out in places like West Texas, it’s important to revisit the basics of how crude oil moves and the role that crude schedulers play. Today, we bring it back to the roots of crude oil operations and shine some light on an underappreciated group of crude oil operators.