RE:RE:CKE: It's about Condensate, Condensate, Condensate vs LXERHertig wrote:
what's the difference between light oil NGL and condensate?
Oil comes in various 'weights' or viscosities. 'Heavy' oil is quite thick and doesn't flow well without diluting it with 'light' oil or (often) condensate (on which below). Because of this, and because of the energy content of different grades of oil, the pricing of light oil tends to be higher than heavy oil.
NGL (natural gas liquids) and condensate come from gas wells. Every gas well produces a wide variety of chemicals: mostly methane (CH4, if you took chemistry), but also ethane (C2H6), propane (C3H8), butane (C4H10), pentane (C5H10), etc. These are all hydrocarbon chains; the longer the chain, the lower the temperature that these chemicals become liquid. Also, the longer the chain, the more valuable it is; so these longer chemicals are extracted in gas plants and sold separately.
Condensates are such chains that are five carbon atoms or longer, so sometimes they are referred to as C5+. These are called condensate because they come out of the ground as liquids (they are already 'condensed') and are collected at the well-head. The largest use for these is as diluent to allow heavy oil and bitumen to flow through pipelines. Because they can be replaced in this function by a slightly larger quantity of light oil, they tend to trade at a premium to light oil, but track it quite closely.
You'll see NGL and condensate used slightly differently in different places. Some treat condensates as part of NGLs (which is understandable, since it is a liquid) and report all NGLs together. Other report them separately.