The federal Renewable Identification Number (RIN) and California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) have long served as tools to force renewable fuels like ethanol into the U.S. fuel supply. They are environmental credits that subsidize production of renewable fuels that would not otherwise be economically justified. Nuances embedded in the design o…

Bluewater Texas, proposed by a 50/50 joint venture (JV) of Phillips 66 (P66) and commodity trading giant Trafigura, is in a unique position in the race to construct a deepwater crude oil export facility along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Of the four marketed deepwater proposals, Bluewater is the only project in the export-centric Corpus Christi market. It …

To closely analyze the natural gas market is to be constantly bombarded with vast amounts of information — weather forecasts, pipeline flows, LNG feedgas, power demand and storage — that is frequently updated, impacting both spot and future prices. But before you can get into the deeper analysis, you’ve got to understand the natural gas value chain…

A macro view of U.S. exploration and production (E&P) company performance over the last quarter century reveals repetitive boom-and-bust cycles driven by periodic extremes in crude oil pricing, including price crashes in 2008, 2014 and 2020. That history contrasts with the remarkable stability in West Texas Intermediate (WTI) realizations since mid…

Permian-focused M&A activity may grab all the headlines, but don’t forget about the Eagle Ford. Over the past couple of years, a steady stream of big-dollar deals have been announced in the South Texas shale play, most of them tied to efforts by growth-oriented E&Ps to increase their scale, improve their operational efficiency and expand their inve…

Situated in West Texas’s Winkler County, the tiny city of Wink (population just under 1,000) might seem easy to overlook but it holds a special place in music history as the childhood home of Roy Orbison — he formed his first band, the Wink Westerners, there in 1949. But beyond its rich musical legacy, Wink in recent years has emerged as a key hub …

If you asked someone where U.S. crude oil shipments would go when the Obama administration ended the ban on most crude exports in December 2015, it’s not likely that Nigeria would have come to mind. Yet this year marked the second time since the restrictions ended that U.S. oil has been sent to the OPEC member, this time to feed its long-awaited Da…

Another day, another mega-deal between top-tier oil and gas producers — or so it seems. Now, it’s ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oil’s turn, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more logical pairing among the ever-shrinking list of big E&Ps that hadn’t already found a partner during the ongoing frenzy to consolidate. In today’s RBN blog, we examine Con…

Energy Transfer is yet again slaking its acquisition appetite by gobbling up another natural gas gatherer and processor to further expand its already formidable Permian footprint. The company announced May 28 that it has struck a $3.25 billion cash-and-stock deal to buy WTG Midstream, a West Texas-based and private equity-backed operator whose Perm…

With an announcement in late 2023 by Dow Chemical that it would be undertaking an enormous expansion of its ethylene production site in Fort Saskatchewan, AB, it was immediately clear that Alberta’s ethane supplies would need to increase by a significant 110 Mb/d. As we’ll discuss in today’s RBN blog, a deal was signed in February between Dow and P…

On the surface, the Bakken story in the mid-2020s may seem as boring as dirt. The boom times of 2009-14 and 2017-19 are ancient history. Crude oil production has been rangebound near 1.2 MMb/d — well below its peak five years ago. And that output has been getting gassier over time, creating natural gas and NGL takeaway constraints that have put a l…

There’s never been any reason to question the drivers for energy infrastructure development — until now. Historically, the drivers were almost always “supply-push.” The Shale Revolution brought on increasing production volumes that needed to be moved to market, and midstreamers — backed by producer commitments — responded with the infrastructure to…

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither were the large, wellhead-to-market natural gas and NGL networks that Phillips 66 and a handful of other midstream empires have assembled — many of them targeting the all-important Permian. Now, P66 has reached an agreement to acquire Pinnacle Midstream, whose associated gas gathering system and gas processing …

The Houston crude oil hub has become busier over the last few months, and if one or more proposals to build a deepwater export terminal nearby capable of fully loading a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) cross the finish line, it could become the hub supplying them. That could push Permian Basin oil flows on Houston-bound pipelines higher at the expe…

There’s never been any reason to question the drivers for energy infrastructure development — until now. Historically, the drivers were almost always “supply-push.” The Shale Revolution brought on increasing production volumes that needed to be moved to market, and midstreamers — backed by producer commitments — responded with the infrastructure to…

Energy Transfer, which is championing its Blue Marlin Offshore Platform (BMOP), may have been the last developer to pursue its critical deepwater export license, but that doesn’t mean it’s out of the hunt. Of the four offshore crude oil export projects, BMOP stands out as the sole brownfield initiative, which should hold down costs and expedite its…

Permian production may have plateaued over the past few months — the shale play’s crude oil output has bounced between 6 MMb/d and 6.3 MMb/d for almost a year now, and natural gas production has hovered around 18 Bcf/d for about as long. But producer-backed plans to continue adding gas processing capacity in the Permian’s Delaware and Midland basin…

The transition of U.S. E&Ps to capital discipline has led to historic shareholder returns and won back legions of investors who had virtually abandoned the industry until a few years ago. But while it might be tempting to conclude producers must finally have their financial houses in good order, a lot of us have witnessed a few boom-and-bust cycles…

Rising global interest in clean ammonia — plus the potential for earning generous federal tax credits — spurred a host of project announcements over the past couple of years, with the first new production capacity slated to start up as soon as 2025. But reality is setting in regarding the pace of clean-ammonia demand growth and the financial, regul…

The growing number of energy-intensive data centers coming online across the U.S. is spurring utilities to ramp up their plans for adding new sources of power generation — including a slew of gas-fired plants — and also complicating their efforts to rely more on renewable resources and decarbonize the power grid. The push to quickly develop new ene…

For the past decade, producers in the Permian Basin have been the driving force in domestic production growth, but lately there has been a hard-to-miss slowdown in incremental production rates for crude, gas and natural gas liquids (NGLs). While Permian producers are primarily motivated by crude oil economics, those volumes also come with a lot of …

For years, the South Texas NGL market was a world of its own — a self-contained liquids ecosystem centered around the refineries and petrochemical plants in the Corpus Christi area. But that all changed about six years ago when EPIC Midstream built a new NGL pipeline from the Permian into Corpus and a new fractionator to process those liquids. Corp…

How can a business survive and thrive while spending $5.30 to make a product that sells for $1.90? That’s what’s happening in the booming renewable diesel (RD) market, where government subsidies allow RD to compete directly with petroleum diesel even though RD is inherently more costly to produce. But as new plants keep coming on stream, RD profit …

The Corpus Christi crude oil market is pulling as much volume as it can from the Permian Basin via pipelines that are running nearly at capacity. That explains why two midstream companies are responding with plans to boost the capacities of their respective pipelines from the Permian to refineries and export terminals in the Corpus area. But the si…

Mexico’s efforts to start up the newest addition to its refining system — the Olmeca refinery — are causing headaches for global buyers of its crudes. Few are convinced that the plant near the country’s key Dos Bocas oil port is ready for service. Yet its operator, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), surprised many with cuts to its crude exports in April,…

The U.S. has become an oil-exporting powerhouse in recent years, propelled by booming shale production, notably from the Permian Basin. U.S. crude oil now flows more freely than ever to help meet global demand, including to Europe, which increasingly turned to the U.S. following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine two-plus years ago, but exports have slow…

U.S. E&Ps’ dramatic strategic shift from prioritizing growth to focusing on cash flow generation and shareholder returns has resulted in more earnings-call talk about dividends and share buybacks and less discussion about efforts to replenish and build their proven oil and gas reserves — a critically important factor in establishing company value. …

The new 650-Mb/d Dangote refinery in Nigeria instantly became Africa’s largest and the world’s seventh-largest by capacity when it finally began processing crude into diesel and aviation fuels in January after years of delays and cost overruns. Long touted as Nigeria’s ticket to ending refined fuels imports by supplying its own markets — with plent…

LNG Canada, under construction for nearly six years on Canada’s West Coast, is rapidly approaching the time when first gas will be entering the plant for testing and calibration of equipment, marking an important transformation for the Western Canadian natural gas market. This will kick off what will likely be about a yearlong testing process befor…

The prospect of decreased crude oil supplies from Mexico, the top international supplier to the U.S. Gulf Coast (USGC), is creating uncertainty among heavy crude-focused refineries. Mexico’s state-owned energy company, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), instructed its trading unit to cancel up to 436 Mb/d of crude exports for April to supposedly focus on…

The largest crude oil pipeline exiting the Permian Basin by volume — Wink to Webster (W2W) — is planned to be offline for maintenance for the first 10 days of June. This is inclusive of Enterprise’s Midland-to-ECHO III (ME III), which reflects the company’s 29% undivided joint interest in W2W. Although the outage has not been publicly confirmed, it…

The intermittent nature of renewable energy is a well-documented thorn in the side of efforts to decarbonize the power grid, especially with more wind and solar generation coming online every year. But while those sources of clean energy are not available all the time, it’s also true that they can sometimes produce more power than transmission line…

China regained its place as the world’s largest LNG importer in 2023, a title it lost in 2022 due to COVID-related shutdowns. Given that China only started importing LNG in 2006, the country’s demand growth — imports last year totaled 71.3 million metric tons (~9.5 Bcf/d), just under 18% of globally traded demand — can only be described as spectacu…

In the race to build the next deepwater crude oil export terminal in the Gulf of Mexico, Sentinel Midstream’s proposed Texas GulfLink (TGL) is currently in second place in the regulatory race, behind only Enterprise’s Sea Port Oil Terminal (SPOT) — and seems to be emerging as a serious contender. The plan offers some compelling attributes, includin…

Moss Lake Partners has announced plans to build a massive 42-inch pipeline known as the DeLa Express to take up to 2 Bcf/d of wet gas 690 miles from the Permian across the Texas state line into Louisiana. It’s an audacious plan, and there’s little doubt that a new natural gas pipeline from the Permian to the Gulf Coast is needed to facilitate conti…

Enbridge’s recent $200 million deal to buy two marine docks and land in Ingleside, TX, from Flint Hills Resources (FHR) may not be much of a surprise, as expanding its role in U.S. crude exports has been part of Enbridge’s strategy since it bought Moda Midstream’s big marine terminal next door nearly three years ago. The former Moda terminal, now k…

As we’ve frequently chronicled, 2022 was a golden year for U.S. exploration and production (E&P) companies and their investors, as soaring commodity prices triggered record cash generation to fund the highest levels of shareholder returns of any American industry. But Camelot didn’t last forever, and the twin impacts of lower hydrocarbon prices and…

The boom in renewable diesel (RD) production has triggered a race to secure the dozen different bio-feedstocks suitable for refining into diesel fuel. It’s an interesting story that impacts both the oil and agriculture industries, with twists and turns that will take years to play out. In today's RBN blog, we describe the current state of the marke…

One of the most anticipated and potentially impactful refinery startups in North America in years is the Dos Bocas project (officially the Olmeca Refinery), a 340 Mb/d plant under development by Mexico’s state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) in the southeastern state of Tabasco. The project was seen as the cornerstone of Pemex’s plans to reduce M…

Crude oil output in the Permian Basin is now averaging 6.3 MMb/d, up about 400 Mb/d from year-ago levels and 800 Mb/d from April 2022. The gains — and related increases in associated gas — have spurred a new round of concerns about pipeline exit capacity, complicating drillers’ hopes to boost crude production. In today’s RBN blog, we will discuss t…

The U.S. may be in a monthslong pause in approving new LNG exports but that doesn’t change the fact that U.S. LNG export capacity will nearly double over the next four years, that most of the new liquefaction plants are being built along the Texas coast, and that their primary source of natural gas will be the Permian Basin. That helps to explain w…

The Biden administration recently announced a very ambitious — to say the least — rule on tailpipe emissions. But while the rule’s legal and political standing might be a bit uncertain — it’s seen by many as a de facto ban on conventionally fueled cars and trucks and is likely to face several court challenges — doubts also remain about whether it m…

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved a request by governors from eight Corn Belt states to remove a summertime waiver for Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) included in the Clean Air Act (CAA) for E10 gasoline, a 90/10 blend of petroleum-derived gasoline blendstock and ethanol. The motive for the governors’ request was a desire to increase…

In the race to build the next deepwater crude oil export terminal along the U.S. Gulf Coast, there’s a lot of competition but one project now has a clear advantage: Enterprise Product Partners’ planned Sea Port Oil Terminal (SPOT), which has made the most progress in moving through the regulatory morass and announced that it had received its deepwa…

Growth for growth’s sake. In the early years of the Shale Revolution, that’s what it was all about. Backed by billions of dollars in Wall Street borrowings, E&Ps plowed vast piles of cash into increasing production. It was the era of “Drill baby drill!” And we all know what happened next. Rabid production growth contributed to oversupply and crude …

The deepwater crude oil export projects under development along the U.S. Gulf Coast offer a number of potential benefits to shippers and customers alike. These include the ability to fully load a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) and the economies of scale that come with that, the elimination of reverse lightering and the corresponding decrease in em…

LNG commerce is composed of two primary models. One is the traditional point-to-point model, on which the industry was founded and still accounts for more than 60% of LNG trade. More recently, the portfolio model has emerged, pursued by upstream oil and gas majors, that would allow them to monetize their gas reserves by converting them to LNG and s…

U.S. E&Ps have just concluded discussions of their Q4 and full-year 2023 results and, as usual, the view of analysts and investors can be summed up by one question: What have you done for me lately? But while the collective results of the 44 producers we track were off from the previous quarter and a record 2022, there’s a lot to be said for how we…

The Uinta Basin in northeastern Utah, which may be the quirkiest production area in the Lower 48, is firing on all cylinders. Production of the basin’s unique waxy crude is at an all-time high, the natural gas takeaway constraints that had threatened to limit growth are being resolved, and demand for waxy crude is on the rise. In today’s RBN blog, …

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently raised a few eyebrows across the energy industry with a report that producers in three key shale states — including Texas, the nation’s #1 oil producer — seem to be extracting larger amounts of “heavier” crude oil. Of course, the oil is only heavier relative to the light and superlight grades tha…