Hydrocarbons

Worried about 2013?  You are not alone.  There are many rational reasons to be concerned about possible developments in energy markets this year, let alone phobias about the number thirteen (triskaidekaphobia).  But hey, this is the first working day of the New Year, so let’s look on the positive side.  In fact we are so psyched that we are going to violate the cardinal rule of consulting.  We are going to make predictions.   Of the future!  So hold on to your seat and get ready for our Top Ten Energy Prognostications for 2013, which according to Chinese astrology is the Year of the Snake.  Hmm, that doesn’t sound good.

During 2012 we’ve posted over 200 RBN blogs, covering everything from ethylene cracker margins (Ethylene Ethylene, Prettiest margin I ever seen), to northeast natural gas basis (The Mighty Algonquin) to the impact of a major crude pipeline reversal (Oh-Ho-Ho it’s Magic).  Now in our last posting of the year it seems appropriate to take a page out of Casey Kasem’s playbook to look back at the top blogs of 2012 based on website hits.  And there’s more!  In response to many members who have asked, we’ll also provide an index of all of our blogs by topic.  And finally we will introduce a new website feature that will give you the ability to see what is trending on the RBN site in real time.  BTW, we are not really going to look at 40 blogs.  After all it is New Year’s Eve.  But we will look a few of the really big winners for 2012.

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.

Sometimes learning is about getting your mind changed.  Over the past couple of days at Bentek’s Benposium conference in Houston there were a lot of presentations and powerpoint slides looking at all sides of the LNG export issue.  I’m still not c

Yesterday was Day#2 of Benposium, the annual Bentek conference being held at the Houstonian hotel in Houston.  It was another day when I could attend the sessions as a participant, which is considerably harder work than it sounds.  Between Tuesday

Yesterday I attended and was a speaker at the Platts 6th Annual Rockies Oil & Gas conference at the Grand Hyatt Denver.  There were about 350 registered attendees, by far th

Yesterday the folks at RBC Capital Markets issued an excellent research piece titled “Cross-Sector Implications of North America Energy Supply Chain Evolution.”  It is a look at the shale revolution from the perspective of a supply chain – the lin

Crude oil production in the Eagle Ford has ramped up from less than 50 Mb/d two years ago to almost 400 Mb/d today, and the growth shows no sign of slowing down.  In most reports and statistics, all of this volume shows up as crude oil.  But it’s

“Prices have dropped to the lowest level in years.  Pipelines are overbooked, and supplies are backing up.  There is just not enough capacity to get out of the supply area and into the market area.  Pipeline capacity is at a premium.  The last tim

It looks like OPEC has started to figure out that this shale thing might be a problem for them.  The evidence?  In the latest edition of OPECs bi-monthly bulletin, there is an article about the environmental risks of shale gas drilling in the nort