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Outer bands from Tropical Storm Cindy darkened Houston’s skies earlier this week, but it’s likely that many in the energy industry believed the gloom was nature’s manifestation of the commodity price markets.
West Texas Intermediate (WTI), which couldn’t quite stay above $45 per barrel (bbl) last week, sank to a nine-month low and then kept sinking below $43/bbl this week. And don’t breathe a sigh of relief that oil has hit bottom.
Amrita Sen, Energy Aspect’s London-based chief energy analyst, told CNBC that crude could easily drop below $40/bbl.
“This is like a falling knife right now; I genuinely haven’t seen sentiment this bad ever,” she said. “We have had clients emailing, saying they have been trading this for 20 or 30 years and they have never seen something like this.”
Brightening the picture was a rise in the price of ethane at Mont Belvieu, Texas, in the past week along with an 8.72% widening of the margin. Among the other positive items on the NGL price front was ... nope, sorry, I got nothin’.
The average weekly price of the hypothetical NGL barrel at Mont Belvieu fell below $23/bbl for the first time since late November. At Conway, Kan., the barrel’s price dropped to its lowest level since early November.
With the exception of a brief dip in March, propane at Mont Belvieu stayed below 60 cents per gallon (gal) for a second week and fell to a seven-month low last week. At Conway, the story was the same except that the price has lingered below 60 cents/gal for three straight weeks.
Cancellations of propane export shipments are expected for the rest of this month, En*Vantage said in a report, which should result in inventory builds. The firm also reports Asian customers are worried that the canceled cargoes in June will lead to a tight market, so they expect higher exports in July.
Butane at Mont Belvieu dropped for the fourth consecutive week to a low not seen since September. The price at Conway was also its lowest in nine months.
The weekly average price of isobutane at Mont Belvieu, which last ducked under 70 cents/gal in September, barely hung on by two-one-hundredths of a cent. At Conway, the slip was not as dramatic but the price fell below 80 cents/gal after it had maintained an 80 cent-plus price for nine of the past 11 weeks.
C5+, which peaked at $1.20/gal in February at Mont Belvieu, saw its average weekly price drop below $1/gal for the first time since November and tumbled to its lowest point since September. Conway’s price of C5+ also broke under $1/gal to reach a nine-month low.
Storage of natural gas in the Lower 48 increased by 61 billion cubic feet (Bcf) in the week ended June 16, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported. The increase, above the Bloomberg consensus of 55 Bcf and the HFI Research forecast of 59 Bcf, resulted in a total of 2.77 Tcf. The figure is 10.5% below the 3.094 Tcf figure at the same time in 2016 and 8.1% above the five-year average of 2.563 Tcf.
Joseph Markman can be reached at jmarkman@hartenergy.com and @JHMarkman.
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