Excellent Update On Steam Cracker Projects -- And The Impact -- RBN Energy -- December 28, 2016

Disclaimer: there will be typographical and factual errors on this page. Facts and opinions are interspersed; it is difficult to tell facts from opinions on the blog. There are no fake stories. At least that I am aware. 

First things first: the other day (yesterday?), I was guilty of a huge miss. An eagle-eyed reader caught it. I posted: " They come in threes: George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and ..." The reader noted I completely missed John Glenn. Thank you. Subconsciously, maybe I put John Glenn in a category all by himself. [Update, December 28, 2016: Carrie Fisher's mother, Debbie Reynolds, age 84, dies one day after her daughter dies. Perhaps those were the three: George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and Debbie Reynolds, with John Glenn in a world of his own.]

Tammy, Billy Vaughn

First things first: a huge call-out to RBN Energy. The blog has taught me so much. If you aren't reading RBN Energy every day you're missing a lot. RBN has a great blog again today.

First things first: top of my list -- read one of Carrie Fisher novels. It's too bad that it takes their dying to realize/understand how great someone is.

Now back to the other stuff.

My wife loved The Kennedy Center Honors last night. I missed it. Hopefully I can catch it later. Thank goodness for YouTube. My wife mentioned that Juanes played a double neck guitar. She had not seen a multi-neck guitar before and was curious if I had. I practically "grew up" watching a great guitarist play a double neck guitar:

My Wife Thinks You're Dead, Junior Brown   That is not my favorite song by Junior Brown but because it features his wife, it's one of my favorite videos of Junior Brown. This particular double neck guitar is not the typical double neck guitar and not the type Juanes played at The Kennedy Center Honors.

From wiki:

In 1985, Brown invented a double-neck guitar, with some assistance from Michael Stevens.

Brown called the instrument his "guit-steel."

The top neck on the guit-steel is a traditional six-string guitar, while the lower neck is a full-size lap steel guitar for slide playing.

Brown has two guit-steels for recording and live work. The original instrument, dubbed "Old Yeller," has as its standard six-string guitar portion the neck and pickups from Brown's previous stage guitar, a Fender Bullet. The second guit-steel, named "Big Red," has a neck laser-copied from the Bullet neck; but in addition to electric guitar pickups, both the standard and lap-steel necks use identical Sho-Bud lap-steel pickups. There is a pocket in the upper bout of the guitar to hold the slide bar when it is not in use.

*********************************

Back to the Bakken

Active rigs: I mentioned yesterday, with the blizzard, I was surprised to see "any" rigs still active in the Bakken. And it looks like we might be seeing something along that line, dropping from 41 to 38 pretty quickly:

	12/28/2016	12/28/2015	12/28/2014	12/28/2013	12/28/2012
Active Rigs	38	61	173	187	186

RBN Energy: steam cracker feedstock selection in changing times. This is another incredible post by RBN Energy. Bottom line: with all the steam crackers coming on line, the demand for feedstock will continue to increase. It begins:

The Shale Revolution has had a profound impact on U.S. NGL markets by vastly increasing production and by lowering NGL prices relative to the prices of crude oil and natural gas. That has been good news for the nation’s steam crackers, the petrochemical plants that have enjoyed low NGL feedstock prices since 2012. But NGL markets are in for some big changes as new U.S. steam crackers coming online over the next two years will be competing for supply with export markets, raising the specter of higher NGL prices—a good thing for NGL producers, but not so for petrochemical companies. How this plays out will be determined by the feedstock supply decisions petrochemical producers make as NGL prices respond to rapidly increasing demand. Today we begin a series on how steam cracker operators determine day-by-day which feedstocks are the most economic, and on the factors driving the value of ethylene feedstock prices.

It ends:

Taking a fresh look at feedstock selection makes sense as 2017 begins because more than a dozen U.S. steam cracker projects that together would add more than 20 billion lb/year of new ethylene production capacity are either under construction or will be soon. As a group, these projects (most of them along the Gulf Coast in either Texas or Louisiana) could increase ethane demand by about 600 Mb/d by the early 2020s. Factor in the possibility of only modest growth in ethane production, continuing ethane takeaway constraints and rising ethane exports (overseas and to Canada) and, well, this could get very interesting.

In between, an incredible discussion of the subject.