It’s been about a year and a half since Next Wave Energy Partners opened its Project Traveler facility, a milestone in the energy industry. Overall, Project Traveler has exceeded production expectations and proven the innovative approach of combining ethylene and isobutane to produce high-quality alkylate. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at what’s been accomplished so far and dive into what’s ahead for Next Wave.
Posts from Lisa Shidler
Wednesday, 5/21/2025
The pipelines carrying crude oil from the Permian Basin in West Texas to the Corpus Christi area have been as jammed as an urban highway on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. The Gray Oak Pipeline, the largest from the Permian to Corpus, has just completed the 80-Mb/d first phase of a planned two-phase expansion that will add a total of 120 Mb/d of capacity. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss what this project means for pipeline congestion and crude exports out of Corpus and nearby Ingleside.
Monday, 5/19/2025
There is tremendous buzz around natural-gas-fired turbines right now with backlogs reportedly stretching five years into the future due to supply-chain bottlenecks, labor shortages and a surge in demand. The power generation industry is poised for a major upswing as data center development and overall electricity demand continue to accelerate, driving an even greater need for gas turbines. In today’s RBN blog, we will explore why gas turbines are so challenging to build and why there’s such a manufacturing backlog.
Friday, 5/09/2025
Much like a cowboy venturing into uncharted territory, E&Ps are roaming Northeast Texas and the far-western sections of the Haynesville Shale in search of more natural gas. It’s a challenging adventure, and while there’s a lot of hope and hype, the recent history of developments outside the Haynesville’s main producing areas shows that success is far from guaranteed. In today’s RBN blog, the second in a series on the Western Haynesville, we’ll discuss how some companies are handling the high-pressure, high-risk environment.
Tuesday, 4/22/2025
The boundaries of what we typically think of as the Haynesville Shale in Northeast Texas and Northwest Louisiana are expanding. E&Ps are increasingly moving out from the core producing acreage and exploring new frontiers, including the far western part of the dry-gas shale play. Wrangling gas from this prospect is challenging, with deeper, high-pressure reservoirs, temperatures up to 450°F and wells drilled to extreme depths of up to 19,000 feet. But with new technology, tenacity and a little bit of luck, it could be quite promising. In today’s RBN blog, Part 1 of a miniseries, we’ll discuss what’s happening in the far western part of the Haynesville.
Monday, 4/07/2025
Growing power demand for data centers has been one of the biggest stories in energy markets over the past year, with natural gas-fired power plants emerging as the primary choice for developers seeking to provide the 24/7 power these massive, energy-intensive sites require. That has led many energy firms to unveil plans to sell power directly to data centers but many tech giants have also announced their own deals. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll dive into recent announcements from firms like Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, which intend to collectively spend about $300 billion this year alone to boost their AI (artificial intelligence) capabilities.
Tuesday, 3/18/2025
The Trump administration announced on February 26 that it is ending Chevron’s permit to operate in oil-rich Venezuela, which will halt U.S. imports of Venezuelan crude by early April. These changes, combined with other recent developments, are likely to significantly impact complex U.S. Gulf Coast refiners relying on heavy crude. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss these impacts — an issue our Refined Fuels Analytics (RFA) practice examined in its recently updated Future of Fuels report.
Monday, 3/10/2025
The pace of announcements for planned data centers accelerated in 2024 and has continued to gather steam in 2025, with natural gas-fired power plants emerging as a frequent choice, along with nuclear power, to provide the around-the-clock electricity that large-scale data centers want and need. In today’s RBN blog, the first in a series, we’ll detail plans by several well-known energy firms to construct new gas-fired plants that would produce electricity specifically for data centers.
Thursday, 3/06/2025
The U.S. power sector is undergoing a major expansion to keep pace with the rising demand for electricity from data centers and other consumers, and trying to do a lot at once. Keep a lid on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by adding wind, solar and other renewables. Maintain grid reliability by supplementing variable renewable energy with more around-the-clock sources like natural gas-fired power plants. Oh, and keep power costs down, too. That’s a big collective ask, and to help make it possible, power grids are turning to so-called “virtual power plants” (aka VPPs) that, with an assist from computers and software, aggregate smaller power sources, batteries and flexible demand to provide power to the grid much like a traditional combined-cycle plant would. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll introduce VPPs and explain why they’re worth learning about.
Friday, 2/28/2025
Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) inventories have been climbing for more than a year, but they could go much higher if President Trump has his way, as one of his major campaign promises was to refill the SPR “to the very top,” a goal he has repeated since his return to the Oval Office. Current inventories sit just below 400 MMbbl, leaving the SPR about 320 MMbbl shy of maximum capacity. But the refilling process may not be as straightforward as one might think, as three of the four SPR storage sites have experienced construction upgrades in the last year — which means things could go slower than anticipated. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss the challenges of filling up the SPR and detail four scenarios for how the process might play out.
Tuesday, 2/18/2025
In the race to build the next deepwater crude oil export terminal in the Gulf of Mexico, Sentinel Midstream’s proposed Texas GulfLink (TGL) has become one of the frontrunners. TGL’s plan gained its crucial Record of Decision (ROD) Approval from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) on February 14, but there is still some distance to go before a final investment decision (FID) is reached. In today’s RBN blog we’ll discuss Sentinel’s TGL plan, why it might be uniquely positioned to move forward, and the other contenders still in play.
Sitting, Waiting, Wishing - Haynesville Gas Producers Hold Steady Ahead of Expected LNG Export Surge
Monday, 2/10/2025
Producers in the Haynesville Shale had anticipated that growth in LNG exports in 2024 would goose prices and propel the play’s role as a crucial source of LNG feedgas. Instead, lackluster demand, exacerbated by delays at the Golden Pass LNG project, contributed to lower-than-expected natural gas prices, which caused some producers to scale back drilling plans and trimmed Haynesville production from about 16 Bcf/d in the first half of 2023 to less than 14 Bcf/d by the end of 2024. So, what do they have planned for 2025? In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss the Haynesville’s promise and challenges and highlight what E&Ps there are planning.
Thursday, 1/30/2025
Tariffs have served as a cornerstone of President Trump’s economic vision. In the campaign, he said he could impose tariffs as high as 25% on all imported goods from Canada — including crude oil — and he could deliver on that promise at any time. This has raised concerns, especially for Canadian producers and U.S. refiners, who depend on the efficient and economical movement of barrels between the trading partners. In today’s RBN blog, we look at how much Canadian crude oil flows to the U.S., how those imports could be affected by tariffs, and how Canadian producers and U.S. refiners would share the financial impact.
Wednesday, 1/15/2025
After a long decline, crude oil production on Alaska’s North Slope is poised to increase, and it’s possible that by the early 2030s production could return to levels not seen since the turn of the century. It’s an exciting development for the 49th state, but where will all that oil go? With refining capacity on the decline in California, which has typically handled a lot of Alaska North Slope (ANS) crude, it’s not an easy answer. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss the locations where ANS oil production could land — one of the many essential topics covered in our upcoming Future of Fuels report.
Monday, 1/13/2025
With just a few days left in office, President Biden on January 6 made a final effort to shape U.S. energy policy and development by permanently banning new oil and gas drilling across more than 625 million acres of coastal waters. Using an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Land Shelf Act (OCLSA), the president signed an executive order banning future drilling in federal waters off the Eastern Seaboard, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the West Coast and portions of the northern Bering Sea in Alaska. The ban is largely just for show, but in today’s RBN blog we’ll discuss why it might cause headaches for the “drill, baby, drill” Trump administration.
