Frac Spread: Alberta Fire Clouds Outlook

The impact from the voracious wildfires that have devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta, will take some time to be fully realized. While Royal Dutch Shell Plc began reduced activity at its Albin Sands mine and Enbridge Inc. restarted its 550,000 barrel per day (bbl/d) Line 18 Pipeline on May 11, many operations are in doubt.

The complex nature of oil sands production means that it might take some time before the 1 million bbl/d in lost output can be recovered, and that does not take into account the time it will take to bring back the thousands of energy industry workers who were forced to flee May 3. Genscape estimates that western Canadian crude output will be cut by 260,000 bbl/d this month as a result of the fire.

Fort McMurray grew as the price of oil grew. A smaller version of Midland (population: 124,000) or Odessa, Texas (population: 110,000), it boomed as oil boomed and slumped as oil slumped. Low prices had already resulted in a projected $8 billion budget deficit for Alberta this year, the New York Times reported.

“It is a pretty big deal,” Derek Burleton, deputy chief economist at the Toronto-Dominion Bank told the Times. “Growth is going to fizzle out.”

Long term, that could be of concern for the entire industry. Rebuilding requires permits, and permit approvals have often been challenged by environmental forces in recent years. For the moment, though, the cutoff of Canadian crude may have the beneficial effect of keeping supply in Cushing, Okla., from reaching critical levels.

“We expect the Canada output crisis to contribute to an improvement in the Cushing balance,” Seaport Global Securities LLC said in its weekly report. U.S. average utilization was 89.1% for the week ending May 6, compared to 93.0% for the same week in 2015.

Simmons & Company pointed to “a large crude draw (despite flat imports and weaker refining runs, possibly indicating that the draw may have been driven by declining production) accompanied by gasoline, distillate and total petroleum inventory draws.”

U.S. natural gas storage rose 56 billion cubic feet (Bcf) or 2.1% during the week, a touch below the Bloomberg consensus of 58 Bcf, to 2.681 trillion cubic feet (Tcf). The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported storage as 43.8% above the 1.865 Tcf level of a year ago and 43.5% over the five-year average of 2011 to 2015.

The price of the hypothetical NGL barrel slipped 3.3% at both Mont Belvieu, Texas, and Conway, Kan., after reaching a seven-month high last week. The Mont Belvieu price is still the second-highest since November 2015, and Conway had not seen consistency in this price range since the early part of October.

The biggest change came from the C₅₊ component, which suffered a 6.6% week-over-week drop at Mont Belvieu and a 4.3% hit at Conway, both close to the levels of a month ago. Mont Belvieu’s C₅₊ price was 30.8% below the $1.2926 per gallon (gal) that it traded at a year ago. Conway’s C₅₊ shed 24.3% of its value in the past year.

Ethane fell for the second straight week at both hubs, dropping below 20 cents/gal at Mont Belvieu for the first time since it failed to break 18 cents/gal a month ago. Conway’s ethane price sagged to 15.4 cents/gal, still better than its performance for the entire first quarter. Both hubs reported ethane at slightly above year-ago prices.

Propane dipped but remained strong at both hubs, with Conway’s 46.23 cents/gal beating its year-ago price by more than 3 cents. While butane may have experienced a slight drop at Mont Belvieu, the price 59.31 cents/gal was still higher than any weekly average since early December.

Similarly, the Mont Belvieu price of isobutene, at 62.44 cents/gal, continued an over-60 cents/gal trend not seen since early December. At Conway, the streak reached five weeks, with the price of 68.90 cents/gal the highest—with the exception of last week—since early November.

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