Accelerating energy market analytics through collaboration, networking and alliances
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Burnin' For You - The Impact of Coal- and Gas-Fired Generation Shifts on Summer Natural Gas Prices
14:11
Last summer, a tight coal market in the Eastern U.S. made an already tight natural gas market even tighter. Low coal stocks, dwindling production and transportation constraints led to exorbitant premiums for Appalachian coal and limited coal consumption in the East, leading to record gas demand for power generation — even as gas prices soared to 14…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Rocky Mountain High - Chevron's $7.6 Billion Deal for PDC Energy Highlights Rich Rockies Cash Flows
15:14
It’s true, the Permian is — and will likely remain — the center of attention in the U.S. oil and gas industry, not just for its massive and still-growing production volumes but also for the ongoing consolidation among producers in the West Texas/southeastern New Mexico play. But while the Permian has dominated production and M&A activity the past c…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


Consider this fact: Three of every five barrels of crude oil produced in the U.S. are exported, either as crude oil or in the form of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel or other petroleum products. Sure, large volumes of crude and products are still being imported, but the net import number is dwindling toward zero — and if you count NGLs (ethane, propane,…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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The Price is Right - North America Crude Oil Price Differentials Explain and Foretell Market Shifts
14:16
There is no debate about it: The CME/NYMEX domestic sweet (DSW) crude oil futures prompt-month contract at Cushing, OK, is the most closely followed benchmark in U.S. energy markets. It’s the price quoted in nightly news reports and general media publications. And now, with U.S. exports of WTI deliverable on the Brent contract, domestic sweet at Cu…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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I Wanna Dance With Somebody - What's Driving the Energy Industry's Latest Cycle of Consolidation?
12:24
The energy industry’s upstream products — crude oil, natural gas and NGLs — are commodities, so the lowest-cost producers generally do best, especially if they are well-connected to downstream markets. Due in large part to the intensity of competition, finite drilling locations, the constant need for capital investment and the chilling effect of po…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Call Me NAESB - Clash Over Force Majeure in the Natural Gas Industry's Master Sale and Purchase Agreement
12:03
The NAESB Contract is a familiar element in the day-to-day dealings between natural gas buyers and sellers in the U.S. — a standard form that serves as a useful draft for short- and long-term gas supply agreements — just fill in its blanks and use it, or adjust it until you have a deal. Winter Storm Uri, the devastating deep-freeze event that broug…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


The feeling is almost palpable among midstreamers: In a fast-changing energy industry, the companies that gather, transport, store and export hydrocarbons need to consolidate and augment — and be smart about how they get bigger. Scale, that’s the key. That — plus complementary assets that provide synergies, lower costs and increase free cash flow, …
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Don't Pass Me By, Part 2 - TransWest Express Shows Challenges in Building Long-Distance Transmission
17:08
At the time it was proposed way back in 2005, the TransWest Express Transmission Project seemed like a straightforward idea — bring renewable energy from Wyoming, then (and now) one of the country’s biggest producers of wind power, to help meet increasing customer demand for electricity in the Desert Southwest. And enabling renewable energy to get …
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Life in the Fast Lane - New DOE Rule Changes Push LNG Projects to Move Fast or Get Left Behind
10:13
The incredible growth in U.S. LNG export capacity over the past few years has been facilitated by a mostly predictable federal permitting process. It may sometimes be slower than developers like and leave them more open to pushback at the state and local level, but LNG export projects that enter the federal permitting process with both the Departme…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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It's All Part of a Bigger Plan - The Case for Energy Transfer's Blue Marlin Crude Oil Export Project
13:29
It’s been two and a half years since Energy Transfer submitted its plan for the Blue Marlin crude oil export project to the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) and, like the large billfish for which the proposed offshore terminal is named, the project has spent most of its time under the surface and out of sight. But that doesn’t mean there hasn’t…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


There’s been a lot of talk over the last year or so about U.S. E&Ps exerting financial discipline by moderating their investments in growth, paying down debt and returning substantial portions of their free cash flow to investors in the form of dividends and stock buybacks. So, worries in the broader economy that the banking crisis and the specter …
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RBN Energy Blogcast


Every day, large volumes of associated gas are flared around the world, mostly because there’s not enough infrastructure in place to transport the gas to market. This isn’t just a colossal waste of energy — flaring generates a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) and, according to a recent study, it’s only 91% efficient (on average) at zapping methane, a pa…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Synchronicity, Part 2 - Canadian Heavy Oil Prices Increasingly Linked to Global Oil Market Developments
14:42
Since the start of this year, Canadian heavy crude oil prices have been steadily improving relative to the light crude oil benchmark of West Texas Intermediate (WTI). Improved access to and through the U.S. as far south as the Gulf Coast has contributed to these better conditions. At the same time, the traditional driver of increasing refinery dema…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Gotta Get Over, Part 5 - The Race to Debottleneck Louisiana Feedgas Routes: Pre-FID Projects
16:01
New U.S. LNG export projects battling rising labor and equipment costs and/or financing woes have one more thing to worry about that the first wave of projects didn’t: ensuring the feedgas supply will be there when they need it. Bottlenecks have already developed for moving natural gas volumes to the Louisiana coast, where the bulk of future export…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


The saying goes, “If you got it, flaunt it,” and the rise of social media has certainly accelerated the ostentatious display of sudden wealth by rock stars, rappers, tech billionaires, star athletes and others. While it might be unseemly for executives at oil and gas companies to indulge in bling from gold chains to $400,000 Maserati GranCabrios to…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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It’s Time, Part 3 - Partners in Clean Ammonia Projects Eye Billions in Federal Tax Incentives
15:15
Clean ammonia, produced by reacting either “blue” or “green” hydrogen with nitrogen, is emerging as one of the most highly touted low-carbon energy sources of the future, thanks largely to massive tax incentives provided by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Skeptics may question the extent to which clean ammonia — and clean hydrogen, on which it’s…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Synchronicity - Canadian Heavy Oil Prices Increasingly Align With Other North American Trading Hubs
11:36
In the past, Canadian heavy oil was all too often the sick man of the North American oil market. Plagued by a limited number of refinery outlets and numerous episodes of insufficient pipeline export capacity from Western Canada, it was often subject to far larger price discounts versus the light crude oil price benchmark of West Texas Intermediate …
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RBN Energy Blogcast


May the 4th be with you! Today — Star Wars Day to many of us — we borrow (and bastardize) one of the most memorable quotes from that epic collection of movies, “May the Force be with you,” to make the point that, like the “Force” that shapes events in the Star Wars universe, for the U.S. oil patch, exports are the lifeblood of today’s market. U.S. …
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RBN Energy Blogcast


U.S. propane stocks are high, 33% over the 5-year average. Year-to-date propane exports are at a robust 1.6 MMb/d, well above the 1.4 MMb/d shipped out in 2022. Increasing propane production must be driving the growth in inventories and exports, right? Nay! Propane production is actually down, falling 9% from September 2022 to December, and even wi…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


As environmental protection and decarbonization efforts have ramped up in the past few decades, policymakers around the world have come up with a variety of schemes to lower industrial emissions. The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 committed developed nations to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by a defined amount from 1990 levels by 2012. The tr…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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It's Time, Part 2 - Federal Incentives, Rising Demand Spur a Slew of U.S. Clean Ammonia Projects
12:30
The global push to decarbonize power generation, shipping and other energy-intensive sectors of the economy and the Biden administration’s efforts to heavily incentivize the development of low-carbon energy sources have resulted in a growing list of big clean ammonia projects in the U.S. Almost all of these proposed multibillion-dollar production f…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which became law several months ago, may have an enormous impact on the U.S. energy landscape over the long run, but many of its key provisions, including the much-discussed tax credits for electric vehicles (EVs), have been missing one big thing: rules of the road. Federal agencies such as the Department of Energ…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


The U.S. won’t add new LNG export capacity this year for the first time since it became an exporter in 2016. But that lull is not going to last long. At least five facilities are under construction and due for completion in the next few years, several other expansions were recently sanctioned, and there are more final investment decisions (FIDs) on…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Walking Contradiction - The Import-Export Mismatch and What it Means for U.S. 'Big 3' Production
12:07
The world is full of paradoxes and apparent contradictions, like the phrase “this page intentionally left blank” on an otherwise empty page in a government report, and the energy sector is no different. The U.S. is the world’s largest exporter of the “Big 3” petroleum products — gasoline, diesel/gasoil and jet fuel/kerosene — but it still imports s…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


Though much smaller in scope than the oil-and-gas producing behemoth of Western Canada, oil production from the offshore of Canada’s easternmost province of Newfoundland and Labrador already has decades of experience behind it. With five offshore fields producing a little under 230 Mb/d as of early 2023, the region’s slow decline is likely to conti…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Money's Too Tight (To Mention) - For LNG Developers and Sponsors, It's a Tricky Path to Reach FID
12:23
In the period between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the end of last year, LNG sales and purchase agreements (SPAs) totaling 47.23 million tons per annum (MMtpa; 6.3 Bcf/d) were signed between buyers and nine U.S. LNG projects under development. Of those, the projects that will ultimately secure a critical mass of reputable offta…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


For some time now, clean ammonia proponents have been talking up its potential as a very-low-carbon alternative for power plants, ships and other hydrocarbon consumers. Still, rock-solid plans for U.S. projects to produce large volumes of ammonia from clean hydrogen remained few and far between. Until lately, that is, with the recent uptick in proj…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


The Shale Revolution transformed the U.S. oil and gas industry operationally and functionally in the late 2000s and early 2010s, but the most significant changes occurred years later. Through the middle and latter parts of the last decade, E&Ps continued to improve their drilling-and-completion techniques and significantly increased production as t…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


For a major oil and gas producer, organic growth over time is all well and good. But if you want next-level scale — and the economies that come with it — there’s nothing like cannon-balling into the deep end of the pool with a huge, game-changing acquisition. ExxonMobil has already done that twice — first in 2010 with the $41 billion purchase of XT…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Now It's Gone, Gone, Gone, Part 2 - To Replace Russian Products, Europe Turns to Asia, Mideast
16:24
Russia has long been a significant supplier of refined intermediates and finished products to Europe, just as it has been of crude oil. That changed, however, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as the European Union (EU) implemented a formal embargo on imports of Russian crude oil in December 2022, followed by refined prod…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Just the Two of Us, Part 5 - Energy Transfer Steps Up Its Permian Game With Lotus Midstream Deal
12:28
It’s not just the upstream side of the Permian that’s in the midst of a major consolidation. Over the past couple of years, a slew of significant M&A deals have been made in the midstream space, most recently Energy Transfer’s $1.45 billion plan to acquire Lotus Midstream. Backed by private equity, Lotus has assembled an impressive array of crude-o…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Cover Me - With Methane Emissions, Solutions Can Be As Tricky to Pin Down As the Problem Itself
12:21
By now, just about everyone is aware of and has been impacted by efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — and methane especially — as a way of meeting global climate goals, but that doesn’t mean everyone is on the same page. The energy industry is a leading source of methane emissions in the U.S., but with nearly 1 million active wells ac…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


Crude oil exports are hitting record volumes. Geopolitical dislocations, regional capacity constraints, and transport cost aberrations are upending global trade flows. These developments have a direct impact on U.S. export grades, prices, and the utilization of pipelines and terminals. Petroleum product exports have an equally formidable set of cha…
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It would be an understatement to say we’re sensing a trend here. Over the past couple of years, there’s been an absolute frenzy of producer M&A activity in the Permian, much of it involving big E&Ps getting bigger and private equity cashing in on assets they’ve been developing since the 2010s. The latest multibillion-dollar deal involves Ovintiv, w…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


If you think, as we do, that (1) U.S. crude oil production is likely to increase by 1.5 to 2 MMb/d over the next five years, (2) almost all those barrels will be light-sweet crude that needs to be exported, and (3) exporters will overwhelmingly favor the marine terminals that can accommodate Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs), it would be hard to ig…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Go All the Way - Proposed Pipelines Would Land Permian Natural Gas on LNG Terminals' Doorstep
11:55
The Permian natural gas pipeline build-out is entering a new era. With numerous LNG terminals set to expand exports along the U.S. Gulf Coast through the end of this decade, the need to link Permian gas supply to those facilities has never been greater. While there have been three greenfield pipelines built out of the Permian in the last five years…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Trading in the USA, Encore Edition - Pulling Back the Curtain on North America's Crude Oil Trading Market
16:41
Trading in the highly integrated US/Canadian crude oil market is undergoing a profound transformation, driven mostly by the pull of exports off the Gulf Coast. But the shifts in flows, values and even the trade structures being used today are not well understood outside a small cadre of professional traders and marketers. Consider a few examples: D…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Ebb and Flow - Commodity Pricing Currents Trigger Significant Regional Shifts in 2023 E&P Investment
17:32
The pandemic-induced shackles on U.S. E&P capital spending were shattered by rising commodity prices in 2022, and total investment for the 42 producers we follow rose a dramatic 54% over 2021. But E&Ps haven’t abandoned the fiscal discipline or focus on cash-flow generation that allowed them to survive COVID-related demand destruction and resuscita…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


Russia supplied significant volumes of crude oil and refined products to Europe for many years. Its primary crude oil export grade, medium-sour Urals (approximately 30 API and 1.7% sulfur), was a benchmark, both in quality and price, that European refiners long relied on to plan refinery processing configurations and that served as a signal for cru…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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The Contenders, Part 3 - LIGH2T Hydrogen Hub Seen as Platform for Industrial-Scale Decarbonization
11:55
There’s been a lot written about the federal government’s plan to provide billions of dollars in financial support to create a limited number of regional hydrogen hubs but not a lot of insight about how those hub proposals are being crafted to meet the Department of Energy’s (DOE) selection criteria. The details and strategies behind those plans ha…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Trading in the USA - When Price Does Not Matter: Exchange Trading, Differentials, and the Cash Roll
11:27
As crude oil exports have become an integral part of US/Canadian trading, the market has evolved to accommodate this profound transformation. But the mechanisms used to price many of the most significant export grades are obscure and little understood outside a small cadre of professional traders and marketers. This is particularly true for the mos…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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It Don't Come Easy, Part 3 - In Quest to Lower Methane Emissions, Picking the Right Technology is Key
9:27
The oil and gas industry is being pushed by regulators, third parties and investors to better identify and mitigate its methane emissions, especially the few “super-emitter” sites that make outsize contributions to overall emissions. But while operators are ramping up capital spending on new technology, one thing has become clear: There is no silve…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Downhill Lullaby - E&Ps Reap Record 2022 Profits, But Eroding Q4 Returns Harken a Less Idyllic 2023
18:00
Last August, we titled our review of Q2 2022 E&P financial results Camelot after rising oil prices and surging natural gas realizations drove revenues, profits and cash flows to levels that seemed like an unrealizable dream for producers that had teetered on the brink of financial instability just two years before. Recent year-end results revealed …
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Don't Pass Me By - Plans for Energy Development Largely Rest on Fate of U.S. Permitting Reform
16:46
If you follow developments in the energy industry, you know that news about permitting for major infrastructure projects can sometimes read more like a horror story: 14 years to build an electric transmission line, a decade to get a mining permit, and the reality that some projects can be constructed in far less time than it takes to secure the req…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Price Tag - European Commission Seeks to Add Transparency to LNG Market, Prevent Price Spikes
12:54
From its origins as a specialized energy source sold under long-term, point-to-point contracts to primarily Asian destinations, LNG has become progressively more commodified as its global reach has spread, with 44 countries now importing it. An increasing proportion of cargoes are destination-flexible and can be sent to the market that offers the b…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


Trading in the highly integrated US/Canadian crude oil market is undergoing a profound transformation, driven mostly by the pull of exports off the Gulf Coast. But the shifts in flows, values and even the trade structures being used today are not well understood outside a small cadre of professional traders and marketers. Consider a few examples: D…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Slow It Down - U.S. E&Ps Temper 2023 Capex Increases After Aggressive Late-'22 Investment Spurt
15:54
In marking the third anniversary of COVID’s onset, the Washington Post detailed a study that showed most of us are already shedding the virus-impacted memories of that tedious and often traumatic time to concentrate on looking ahead — a trait scientists label “future-oriented positivity bias.” That transition was clearly evident in the 2022 investm…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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From Here to There to You - Enbridge's Heavy- and Light-Oil 'Supersystems' to Texas's Gulf Coast
11:36
In small steps and giant leaps, Enbridge has been building out two “supersystems” for transporting crude oil to refineries and the company’s own export terminals along Texas’s Gulf Coast, one moving heavy crude all the way from Alberta’s oil sands to the Houston area and the other shuttling light oil from the Permian to Enbridge’s massive terminal …
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RBN Energy Blogcast


The buzz and activity around renewable diesel (RD), a chemically identical “drop-in” replacement for traditional petroleum-based diesel, continues to grow. The goals with RD, which is produced from renewable feedstocks, are to reduce the need for petroleum and to lower life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions — critical steps in meeting climate ag…
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RBN Energy Blogcast


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Hard Habit to Break - How Will EPA's Plan for Year-Round E15 Sales in Eight States Play Out?
14:32
At first glance, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposal to facilitate increased sales of E15 — an 85/15 blend of gasoline blendstock and ethanol — by putting it on the same summertime regulatory footing as commonly available E10 in eight Midwest/Great Plains states might seem like a boon to corn farmers and ethanol producers. But as w…
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