MIDLAND, Texas—How’s the year been so far? If you were absorbing the ambience of the Midstream Texas Conference this past week, you might agree that things in the sector have gone fairly well.

Focus more specifically on the NGL market and you might adopt a more Oliver Twist-like approach: please, sir, I want some more.

Who wouldn’t? The hypothetical NGL barrel (bbl) at Mont Belvieu, Texas, posted an average price of $31.59 from January through May, a 28.4% hike compared to the same period in 2017. The increase was not as pronounced at Conway, Kan., but the 2018 average price in that hub of $27.64/bbl was a healthy 16% over 2017 in this timeframe.

Margins were particularly strong, with the Mont Belvieu barrel widening by 81.1% and Conway’s expanding by 22.2%. And then there was ethane’s 2018 margin, which rocketed to a 277% advantage over January-May 2017.

The argument could, of course, be made that the January-May 2017 period was just plain rotten for NGL. Ethane’s Mont Belvieu average margin for the first five months of 2017 was under 2 cents per gallon (gal). The dramatic leaps in the margins for propane and isobutane in 2018 are in part due to how tight they were last year.

But back to our happy place.

Mont Belvieu propane was up 34.2% in 2018 over the first five months of 2017. The average margin of 32 cents/gal soared 89.3% to just under 60 cents/gal.

In the week ended June 1, storage of natural gas in the Lower 48 experienced an increase of 92 billion cubic feet (Bcf), compared to the Bloomberg consensus forecast of 89 Bcf, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported. The figure resulted in a total of 1.817 trillion cubic feet (Tcf). That is 30.5% below the 2.616 Tcf figure at the same time in 2017 and 22% below the five-year average of 2.329 Tcf.

Joseph Markman can be reached at jmarkman@hartenergy.com and @JHMarkman.

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