Many people think of fossil fuels as coal, crude oil and natural gas, with the nastiness of their toxic emissions lying in that order. Among the less colorful comments during the second Presidential debate was Hillary Clinton’s reference to natural gas as a “bridge” fuel, sitting between today’s reliance on hydrocarbons and a future of renewables (solar, wind […]
A couple of months ago we wrote about how the U.S. had sent a shipment of Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) to the United Arab Emirates (see Coals to Newcastle). The notion of natural gas being extracted under a field in Pennsylvania, processed and then transported by pipeline to Louisiana, chilled and condensed to liquid form, […]
OPEC Blinks Last week OPEC announced a plan to reduce their crude oil production, from August’s level of 33.23 MMB/D (Million Barrels a Day) to somewhere between 32.5 and 33 MMB/D. The last time OPEC agreed to curb output was in 2008. Healthy skepticism correctly greets OPEC’s pronouncements on production curbs. Saudi Arabia is the […]
If I had $1MM for every time an MLP investor has asked me where crude oil is going, well I could probably buy a good chunk of Plains All American (PAA), the biggest crude oil pipeline operator in the U.S. But PAA aside, MLPs are not as closely aligned with crude oil as popularly believed. […]
Investors in Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs) like their distributions to be reliable and, by comparison with other asset classes, generous. Investors in the General Partners (GPs) that control them hold a more discerning view on value creation. Last month we highlighted how Williams Companies (WMB) was giving its MLP investors in Williams Partners (WPZ) what […]
On Tuesday morning, Enbridge (ENB) and Spectra (SE) revealed how they’d spent the Labor Day weekend by announcing their merger. After the highly contentious and ultimately unconsummated Energy Transfer/Williams soap opera, it was a welcome surprise to see two large energy companies join their businesses agreeably, without rancor. Although the financial media excitedly covered the […]
Talk about MLPs nowadays and pretty soon you’ll get to crude oil. Few will quickly forget the collapse in crude from 2014 that led to the collapse in MLPs. To be an MLP investor seemingly requires a view on the price of what moves through their infrastructure (although only 7% of pipelines in the […]
We generally don’t keep CNBC on at our office. Its relentless focus on the short term, punctuated with incessant commercials, make it a needless distraction. That’s why they hire attractive presenters. However, when passing the office next door I did notice a headline saying we’d gone 33 consecutive days without a 1% move in the […]
Stocks have in recent years been the destination of choice for bond refugees. The guiding strategy behind monetary policy since 2008 has been to drive investors into riskier assets so as to boost economic growth. Amid mounting evidence that this objective was being achieved, the Federal Reserve has contemplated the timing around ending this strategy […]
For information on our MLP mutual fund, please click the link below: Last week’s blog post (Williams Satisfies Two Masters) highlighted the different views of cash payouts by the MLP investors who hold Williams Partners (WPZ) and the C-corp investors who hold Williams Companies (WMB), the General Partner of WPZ. WPZ investors value regular payouts […]
