Six Wells Coming Off Confidential List Today -- October 1, 2019

The fourth quarter begins with a bang -- six wells coming off the confidential list today -- Tuesday, October 1, 2019: 6 for the month; 6 for the quarter:

• 34761, 1,248, Whiting, Berger 24-10-1TFH, Tyrone, t4/19; cum 85K 8/19;
• 34594, SI/NC, Hess, EN-Weyrauch B-LE-154-93-3031H-1, 
• 34440, 1,084, Enerplus, Mallard 148-93-20B-29H-TF, McGregory Buttes, t4/19; cum 126K 8/19;
• 34439, 627, Enerplus, Daffy 148-93-20A-29H, McGregory Buttes, t4/19; cum 149K 8/19;
• 34438, 619, Enerplus, Muscovy 148-93-20A-29H-TF, McGregory Buttes, t4/19; cum 143K 8/19;
• 34437, 927, Enerplus, Canvasback 148-93-20B-29H, McGregory Buttes, t4/19; cum 136K 8/19

Active rigs:

	10/1/2019	10/01/2018	10/01/2017	10/01/2016	10/01/2015
Active Rigs	59	63	58	33	68

RBN Eenrgy: ethane prices may rise with steam-cracker demand, but not by much.

The U.S. ethane market has experienced major ups and downs in the past couple of years. First, there was sharply rising demand from new steam crackers, a fractionation-capacity crunch and soaring ethane prices. Then came an ethane demand slump, plummeting prices and a big jump in inventories. More recently, though, the market seems to have returned to a state of relative equilibrium. Ethane prices have settled in — at least for now — at about 22 cents/gallon (gal), a couple of pennies below where they had been standing rock-steady before all hell broke loose. Ethane demand from existing steam crackers is rising again, and new cracker capacity is coming online. The questions now are, with demand on the upswing, will ethane prices be rising too — and, if so, by how much? And what does that mean for steam cracker economics? Today, we discuss recent developments in the ethane market and explain why there’s good reason to believe that ethane prices won’t be spiking anytime soon.

Earlier we explained that ethane is unique among the so-called NGL “purity products” in that it can either be "rejected" into the natural gas stream at gas processing plants and sold (at the price of gas) for its BTU value or extracted from mixed NGLs (through fractionation) like its purity-product brethren and sold to steam crackers (to produce ethylene and other petrochemical byproducts) or to a very limited number of power plants as fuel. 

Comment: how far we've come! I vividly remember in the early days of the blog I completely misunderstood the concept of "rejection." A reader explained it to me. Much, much appreciated at the time, and still appreciated.