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Ford Oil Corporation Readies Colombia Crude Push, Waiting on the First New Exploration Permits in Years
With Colombia set to inaugurate a new president on August 7 and its oil reserves running thin, Ford Oil Corporation says
By John Winkler · 6 min
Why Natural Gas Prices Go Negative at Waha: The Physics of Stranded Associated Gas
In the Permian, gas is a byproduct of oil, and when the pipes fill up producers will literally pay to hand it off, which
By Mike Miller · 6 min
The Three Global Gas Benchmarks: How Henry Hub, TTF, and JKM Diverged Into Separate Worlds
Henry Hub, TTF, and JKM are supposed to describe one global gas market, but a shortage of liquefaction plants and ships
By Christy Davis · 6 min
Why Refiners Don't Want Too Much Condensate: The Naphtha Glut Problem
Ultra-light condensate is cheap crude that yields the wrong barrel, which is why it ends up in dedicated splitters, petr
By John Winkler · 5 min
Henry Hub and the Peculiar Physics of the American Gas Price
US natural gas swings harder than oil and occasionally sells for less than nothing in West Texas, and the reason comes d
By Aaron Wilson · 7 min
The Nelson Complexity Index: How to Read a Refinery Like a Balance Sheet
One number tells you whether a plant can turn cheap, heavy, sour crude into high-value diesel and jet, or whether it's s
By John Winkler · 6 min
Crude
All Crude →
The API Gravity Ladder: How Light-Sweet and Heavy-Sour Crudes Command Different Prices
Two numbers on an assay sheet, density and sulfur, decide which refineries can run a barrel and how many dollars separat
By Mike Miller · 5 min
Why Brent and WTI Trade at a Spread - And What the Gap Actually Tells You
The Brent-WTI differential isn't a mispricing to arbitrage away; it's the running cost of getting landlocked American cr
By Aaron Wilson · 5 min
The Hidden Life of a WTI Barrel: How Cushing Became the Pricing Heart of American Crude
A landlocked Oklahoma town of about 8,000 people sets the settlement price of the world's most-traded oil contract, beca
By Aaron Wilson · 6 minRefining
All Refining →
The Catalytic Cracker: The Beating Heart That Turns Sludge Into Gasoline
The fluid catalytic cracker takes the heavy gas oil nobody wants and cracks it into the gasoline and propylene that pay
By John Winkler · 6 min
Why the U.S. Hasn't Built a New Major Refinery in Decades - and What That Means for Fuel Prices
No company has built a full-scale greenfield refinery in the United States since 1977, and the reasons behind that droug
By Christy Davis · 6 min
The Crack Spread: How Refiners Actually Make (and Lose) Money Turning Crude Into Fuel
The 3-2-1 crack spread is the single number that tells you whether a refinery is minting cash or bleeding it, and it is
By John Winkler · 6 minDiesel
All Diesel →
The Diesel Crack Spread: The Single Best Barometer of the Real Economy
Distillate margins track freight, farming, and factories, which makes diesel the honest signal buried inside refining ec
By John Winkler · 6 min
ULSD and the 15-ppm Sulfur Cliff That Rebuilt Global Diesel
The move to ultra-low-sulfur diesel forced refiners into a decade of hydrotreating and hydrogen spending that still deci
By John Winkler · 6 min
Why the World Keeps Running Short of Diesel While Awash in Crude
Crude is plentiful, but the world keeps running low on diesel because closed refineries and an ever-lighter crude barrel
By Christy Davis · 6 minGasoline
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Summer-Grade vs. Winter-Grade Gasoline: The Hidden Reason Pump Prices Jump Every Spring
A single volatility spec, Reid Vapor Pressure, quietly rewrites what refiners can pour into your tank every spring, and
By John Winkler · 6 min
The RBOB Machine: How Summer-Grade Gasoline Blending Sets the Pump Price
A pound or two of vapor pressure and a calendar date are why your gasoline gets more expensive every spring, and why the
By John Winkler · 6 min
Octane Economics: Why Premium Gasoline Costs More Than It Should
The extra 50-plus cents you pay for premium is not really a fuel cost; it is the price of a scarce blendstock pool that
By John Winkler · 6 minJet Fuel
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Jet Fuel Is Just Kerosene - So Why Is Its Price So Hard to Hedge?
Airlines burn a fuel with no deep futures market of its own, so they hedge with heating-oil and crude proxies that mostl
By Roy Thomas · 6 min
The Distillate Tug-of-War: How Refiners Choose Between Diesel and Jet
Jet fuel and diesel are cut from the same slice of the barrel, and refiners quietly slide the yield toward whichever cra
By John Winkler · 6 min
Jet Fuel Demystified: Why Jet-A Is Really Kerosene, and How Its Spec Keeps Planes Safe
Strip away the branding and Jet-A is a tightly controlled cut of kerosene, and three numbers on its spec sheet, freeze p
By Roy Thomas · 7 minNatural Gas
All Natural Gas →
Associated Gas: The Byproduct That Shale Drillers Can't Give Away
In the Permian, natural gas comes up whether you want it or not, and when the pipes fill the price goes below zero and t
By Mike Miller · 5 min
Mexico's Natural Gas Imports Hit Record 6.6 Bcf/d as Pemex Output Keeps Sliding
Mexico pulled a record 6.6 Bcf/d of pipeline gas from the United States in 2025 to cover about three-quarters of demand,
By Mike Miller · 4 min
ExxonMobil Cuts Permian Flaring Intensity Toward Zero-Routine Target
The company says it has ended routine flaring across its operated Permian assets and is folding the former Pioneer acrea
By Mike Miller · 5 minCondensates
All Condensates →
Condensate: The 'Almost-Crude' That Refineries Love and Hate
Ultra-light hydrocarbon liquids sit in a regulatory and refining gray zone between crude and NGLs, and where you draw th
By Mike Miller · 6 min
How Condensate Became the Wild Card in US Shale Export Math
A pair of quiet 2014 Commerce Department rulings let lightly distilled condensate leave the country as a petroleum produ
By Christy Davis · 6 min
The Diluent Trade: How Condensate Keeps Canadian Oil Sands Flowing
Alberta's bitumen is too thick to move by pipe, so a cross-border condensate supply chain worth hundreds of thousands of
By Karen Anderson · 6 minShipping & LNG
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The LNG Cold Chain: Why Liquefying Gas Costs a Quarter of Its Value
Chilling gas to minus 162 Celsius and shipping it across an ocean is a capital-heavy relay that only earns its keep when
By Karen Anderson · 6 min
The Cost of Cold: How LNG Is Liquefied, Shipped, and Regasified Across Oceans
Cooling gas to minus 162 degrees Celsius shrinks it 600-fold and makes it shippable, but the energy, steel, and boil-off
By Karen Anderson · 5 min
Chokepoints: The Five Straits That Hold the Oil Market Hostage
Roughly a third of the world's seaborne oil squeezes through five narrow lanes, and the detours around them cost weeks,
By Karen Anderson · 5 minGeopolitics
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How OPEC+ Actually Sets Production Quotas - and Why Compliance Is Never 100%
OPEC+ output policy runs on reference baselines, a monitoring committee, and a panel of outside data firms, and the gap
By Christy Davis · 6 min
OPEC+ Spare Capacity: The Market's Invisible Shock Absorber
The few million barrels Saudi Arabia and the UAE can bring online in weeks are the real reason a Gulf tanker scare no lo
By Christy Davis · 6 min
The Anatomy of an Oil Sanction: How Barrels Get Blacklisted and Still Move
Price caps, dark fleets, and mid-ocean ship-to-ship transfers explain why sanctioned crude almost never vanishes from th
By John Winkler · 6 min