Friday, July 31, 2015

Active rigs:

	7/31/2015	07/31/2014	07/31/2013	07/31/2012	07/31/2011
Active Rigs	73	193	180	208	184

It appears it was on July 24, 2015, active rigs in North Dakota jumped from 70 to 73 (after hitting a post-boom low of 68 some days earlier), and since July 24, the number of active rigs (73) has not changed. This is the longest period of time when the number of rigs did not move at least one rig up or down, to the best of my recall.

RBN Energy: making propylene from natural gas.

A proposed BASF plant in Freeport, TX - that would make propylene from natural gas – is expected to be the subject of a final investment decision in 2016. If the plant is built it will have a similar purpose to another 6 Gulf Coast plants being built or planned in the next few years to make propylene from propane. All these plants are designed to make up for lower propylene output from U.S. petrochemical steam crackers using ethane, which yields less propylene from the cracking process. Today we discuss why using natural gas as a feedstock instead of propane might make sense.

There’s an awful lot of new petrochemical infrastructure being built along the Gulf Coast these days – most of it designed to process abundant supplies of natural gas liquids (NGLs) extracted from rich gas. Our latest Drill Down report “It’s Not Supposed To Be That Way” details 10 expansion and new capacity projects for petrochemical steam crackers. Those new facilities will mostly use ethane feedstock to produce ethylene. Our “Son of a PDH Man” series detailed six new plants along the Gulf Coast being built to produce “on-purpose” propylene by propane dehydrogenation (PDH).

There are other petchem plants being developed to use natural gas as a feedstock to produce petrochemicals.  We have documented more than a dozen methanol mega-projects in various stages of planning, design and construction, most of them along the Gulf Coast that (if they are all built) could increase US methanol production capacity more than 10-fold and consume as much as 2.4 Bcf/d of natural gas feedstock (see Skyrockets in Flight). Another chemical derived from natural gas is ammonia – that is mostly used as fertilizer and is now being manufactured again in the U.S. for the first time in years (see Fertile Prospects for Natural Gas).

We have also posted blogs on plans by SASOL and Shell to build two huge plants converting natural gas to liquids (GTL) in Louisiana (see Jumping Jack Gas) – both of those projects have subsequently been put on hold in the wake of lower oil prices. This time we take a closer look at a project proposal that advanced a step in March of this year when BASF selected Freeport, TX as the site for a new world-scale methane-to-propylene plant. The BASF plant – the first of its type in the U.S. would produce 475 thousand metric tons per year of propylene – subject to a final investment decision (FID) by BASF in 2016.