There’s a lot going on in North American crude oil markets these days. Exports are running strong. Midland WTI is now deliverable into Brent (but only if it meets specs). Pipelines from the Permian to Corpus Christi are maxed out, pushing incremental production to Houston. The price differential between WTI at Midland and Houston is nearing zero. And the value of heavy Western Canadian Select (WCS) delivered to the U.S. continues to bounce all over the place. Are these unrelated, random events in the quirky U.S. physical crude market, or are they logical developments linked by the economics of refinery preferences, quality shifts, export demand, and logistics? As you might expect, we think it’s the latter. Believe it or not, crude markets sometimes do behave rationally — and, from time to time, even predictably. That’s what we explore in today’s RBN blog.
Posts from Rusty Braziel
A great deal of attention has been heaped on the carbon-capture industry over the past couple of years, from its inclusion in major federal legislation such as 2021’s infrastructure bill and last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, plus all sorts of recently announced carbon sequestration projects. Still, there are plenty of concerns that the technology is not fully baked, that many of the projects are not ready for prime time, and that few have the practical know-how to deploy carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) at scale. But what if there was a company that has been doing carbon sequestration for a very long time — decades in fact? And what if that company has built out a huge carbon dioxide (CO2) collection, distribution and sequestration system on the Gulf Coast along with concrete plans for a massive expansion of this network to capture a lot more manmade, “anthropogenic” CO2, not in decades but in just a few short years? A company like that would be pretty much the ideal acquisition candidate for a cash-flush multinational with big ESG goals and strategies, right? As we discuss in today’s RBN blog, that is just what is happening with ExxonMobil’s acquisition of Denbury, a deal that will create today’s undisputed leader in CCS.
Crude oil exports hit 5.6 MMb/d last week, the second-highest level in EIA stats ever. Exports in the first six months of the year have averaged 4.1 MMb/d, 28% — or nearly 1 MMb/d — higher than the same period in 2022. And with Midland WTI crude now deliverable into global benchmark Brent, even more exports are on the way. Which makes it ever more important to understand how physical spot crude oil is priced at Gulf Coast export terminals. After all, exporters only move crude off the dock when they can make money doing so — well, at least most of the time. And that depends on what it costs to get a given crude grade to the dock, what it’s worth when it gets there, the cost of shipping to overseas destinations, and the price realized when the cargo lands there. To shed more light on those export economics, in today’s RBN blog, we continue our exploration of crude oil pricing in the markets for physical U.S. and Canadian crudes.
There is no debate about it: The CME/NYMEX domestic sweet (DSW) crude oil futures prompt-month contract at Cushing, OK, is the most closely followed benchmark in U.S. energy markets. It’s the price quoted in nightly news reports and general media publications. And now, with U.S. exports of WTI deliverable on the Brent contract, domestic sweet at Cushing is arguably setting the price for crudes around the world. But the fact is, most crudes traded in physical markets across North America are not priced at the DSW-at-Cushing benchmark but instead at a differential to Cushing — higher or lower on any given day based on each crude’s unique quality, location, and supply/demand characteristics. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss how the behavior of differentials from the Cushing benchmark can go a long way to explain what is happening with crude oil production, transportation volumes, storage and, of course, exports.
Crude oil exports are hitting record volumes. Geopolitical dislocations, regional capacity constraints, and transport cost aberrations are upending global trade flows. These developments have a direct impact on U.S. export grades, prices, and the utilization of pipelines and terminals. Petroleum product exports have an equally formidable set of challenges. U.S. surpluses of refined products are growing as domestic demand falls and biofuel penetration increases. The impact will translate directly into shifts in flows between PADDs, the repurposing of infrastructure, and more exports from the Gulf Coast. We’ll be exploring these and many more developments at our upcoming conference, xPortCon-Oil 2023, to be held in Houston on June 8, 2023. In this blatantly advertorial blog, we will introduce the major topics to be covered at the conference, who will be participating, and why we believe this will be the most important industry gathering for crude and products markets this year.
Trading in the highly integrated US/Canadian crude oil market is undergoing a profound transformation, driven mostly by the pull of exports off the Gulf Coast. But the shifts in flows, values and even the trade structures being used today are not well understood outside a small cadre of professional traders and marketers. Consider a few examples: Domestic sweet oil traded at Cushing on NYMEX is not West Texas Intermediate — WTI at Cushing has averaged a hefty $1.80/bbl over NYMEX for the past year. Most spot Houston and Midland crudes trade as buy-sell swaps. WTI in Houston trades at a discount to Corpus Christi and sweet crudes in Louisiana. Crude in Wyoming trades at a premium to Cushing. And the Gulf Coast is the highest-value market for Canadian heavy crude. This is not your father’s (or mother’s) oil trading game. Our mission in this blog series is to pull back the curtain on physical crude trading in North America, explain how it works, what sets the price, and who is doing the deals.
As crude oil exports have become an integral part of US/Canadian trading, the market has evolved to accommodate this profound transformation. But the mechanisms used to price many of the most significant export grades are obscure and little understood outside a small cadre of professional traders and marketers. This is particularly true for the most liquid grades that employ a trading approach known as “exchange trading” or “spread trading,” in which volumes at regional hubs are valued in buy-sell transactions against domestic sweet crude at Cushing. In this context, “exchange trading” does not mean trading on a regulated exchange. Instead, it means trading via an exchange of barrels between buyer and seller. In today's RBN blog, we delve into some of the most complex aspects of this trading mechanism.
Trading in the highly integrated US/Canadian crude oil market is undergoing a profound transformation, driven mostly by the pull of exports off the Gulf Coast. But the shifts in flows, values and even the trade structures being used today are not well understood outside a small cadre of professional traders and marketers. Consider a few examples: Domestic sweet oil traded at Cushing on NYMEX is not West Texas Intermediate — WTI at Cushing has averaged a hefty $1.80/bbl over NYMEX for the past year. Most spot Houston and Midland crudes trade as buy-sell swaps. WTI in Houston trades at a discount to Corpus Christi and sweet crudes in Louisiana. Crude in Wyoming trades at a premium to Cushing. And the Gulf Coast is the highest-value market for Canadian heavy crude. This is not your father’s (or mother’s) oil trading game. Our mission in this blog series is to pull back the curtain on physical crude trading in North America, explain how it works, what sets the price, and who is doing the deals.
For the first 10 years of the Shale Revolution, it was a foregone conclusion: High prices stimulated more drilling, and more drilling meant higher production. It worked in both directions. When prices crashed, so did production. The correlation was great. The relationships were right on cue in 2014-15 when $100/bbl crude crashed to $30, rebounded to $60 by 2019, and wiped out in 2020 when the COVID meltdown hit. But then the market shifted. As prices ramped up in 2021 — eventually to astronomical levels in 2022 — the phenomenon of producer discipline kicked in, with E&Ps capping their drilling programs and returning a significant slice of their rising free cash flow to their shareholders. The near-term market implications of this new dynamic have been extensively documented in the RBN blogosphere. But what does it mean for the future? Especially for intrepid energy analytics companies (like RBN) that, by necessity, must project producer behavior far into the future to determine what production will look like next year, next decade and even further over the horizon. In this new RBN blog series, we will examine that dilemma, the assumptions RBN makes, and what our forecasts for the next few years look like.
Worried about 2023? Well, you’ve got good reason to be. This year energy markets are at the mercy of a hot war in Europe, the threat of a global recession, looming China/Taiwan hostilities, the impending onslaught of new energy transition programs from recent legislation, and all sorts of other random black swans paddling around out there. With so much uncertainty ahead, predictions this year would be just crazy talk, right? Nah. No mere market murkiness will dissuade RBN from sticking our collective necks out to peer into our crystal ball one more time. Let’s hope it’s no bad bunny.
Worried about 2023? Well, you’ve got good reason to be. This year energy markets are at the mercy of a hot war in Europe, the threat of a global recession, looming China/Taiwan hostilities, the impending onslaught of new energy transition programs from recent legislation, and all sorts of other random black swans paddling around out there. With so much uncertainty ahead, predictions this year would be just crazy talk, right? Nah. No mere market murkiness will dissuade RBN from sticking our collective necks out to peer into our crystal ball one more time. Let’s hope it’s no bad bunny.
As we bid adieu to 2022, it’s once again time for the Top 10 RBN Energy Prognostications, our long-standing tradition where we look into our crystal ball to see what the upcoming year has in store for energy markets. And unlike many forecasters, we also look into the rearview mirror to see how we did with last year’s predictions. Ouch. No, we did not predict a lingering, hot war in Europe in 2022, and that had a variety of ramifications for our scorecard this time around. Even so, we actually feel pretty good about those market calls. Most turned out to be spot-on, and for the others, well, it’s informative just to see what we thought was going to happen in 2022, pre-Ukraine. Then tomorrow we’ll take on the challenge of predicting the energy markets of 2023. But today it’s time to look back. Back to what we posted on January 2, 2022.
Well, you might say energy markets got smacked upside the head in 2022. After a decade of energy abundance, a meltdown in demand in 2020, and what looked like a budding recovery in 2021, energy security had devolved into a back-burner issue. After all, why worry about existing fuel sources when they would soon be replaced by waves of renewable and sustainable fuels? Then, literally overnight, the world changed on February 24, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Prior assumptions about energy security were out the window. Suddenly, the availability, source of production and, of course, the price of traditional energy were front-and-center. In fact, those priorities swiftly overshadowed energy-transition goals. We could see that shift in focus every day at RBN by monitoring the website hit rate of our blogs to see which ones garnered the most interest. This year, all of the top blogs were in some way tied to energy security. So today we dive into our Top 10 blogs based on the number of rbnenergy.com website hits to see how energy security has permeated all aspects of energy markets.
U.S. exports of crude oil, LNG, NGLs and refined products have moved into the spotlight on the world stage. Within the past few years, global markets have come to rely on U.S.-sourced hydrocarbons to meet critical needs for energy supplies. But export volume growth has slowed. Demand in the U.S. is ramping up, leaving less available for shipment overseas. And some members of Congress are encouraging the Biden administration to curtail or even ban some exports. What’s next for U.S. hydrocarbon sales to international markets? Will U.S. exports be there to challenge Russia’s use of oil and gas as political weapons? Or could market, logistical and political forces disrupt the flows that are meeting energy needs of the world? Today, we preview the deep dive into these issues on the agenda at RBN’s upcoming xPortCon conference.
Gasoline and diesel prices are skyrocketing. Refineries are running near maximum capacity. The Biden administration is asking refiners to bring more capacity online to relieve refining constraints. And as the economy recovers from the COVID meltdown, it looks set to get worse before it gets better. So the timing could not be better to launch our new team focused on refineries and refined products: RBN Refined Fuel Analytics. We readily admit that this is an advertorial but stick with us, it will be worth it. We’re building out a whole new approach to the understanding of refined fuel markets –– both traditional hydrocarbons and renewable fuels –– from feedstocks through refining processes to final products. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll introduce the who, what and how of this important initiative.
