US propane exports and supply

This page tracks the weekly US propane balance from EIA's Weekly Petroleum Status Report: exports, production, imports and product supplied, propane and propylene counted together throughout, in thousand barrels per day. EIA publishes it every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. Eastern for the week that ended the previous Friday, with holiday weeks pushed to Thursday, alongside the stocks numbers this site tracks. The four lines tie back to inventory: production plus imports, minus exports and product supplied, is roughly the week's change in US propane stocks.

Exports

Exports are mostly cargoes loaded at Gulf Coast marine terminals for buyers overseas. The US has been a net propane exporter since 2010 and now ships more of its supply overseas than any other country loads, so this line is not a footnote to the domestic market; it is one of the two claims, with domestic demand, on everything US production makes.

Because export cargoes bid for the same barrels a US dealer's rack supply comes from, a heavy loading program can pull on Gulf Coast stocks and firm the Mont Belvieu wholesale price in a week that has nothing to do with US weather. That is the export-parity mechanism: US retail prices carry a floor set partly by what an overseas buyer is willing to pay, not only by domestic heating demand. Loadings run lumpy week to week, since a single large cargo can move the number on its own, so this series is better read as a trend over several weeks than as a single reading against the one before it.

Production

Production is the volume gas processing plants and refineries put into the supply chain. Roughly three-quarters of it is a byproduct of natural gas processing, stripped out of the raw gas stream at plants across Texas, the Midcontinent, Appalachia and the Rockies; the balance comes off crude oil at refineries. It moves independently of heating demand: gas plants and refineries run to a fairly steady schedule set by drilling and refining activity, not by the weather.

When production runs ahead of exports and demand, US propane stocks build and the Mont Belvieu benchmark tends to soften into the season; when it lags, the same mechanism works in reverse. Retail follows wholesale with a lag measured in weeks, not days. The district table above shows whether a national move is broad-based or concentrated in one part of the country.

Imports

Imports are the smallest of the four lines, usually a fraction of exports. They arrive mainly by pipeline from Canada into the Midwest and East Coast, with some marine cargoes landing directly at Northeast terminals when regional supply runs tight or a cold snap outruns what pipeline and rail can deliver in time.

Their effect on retail prices is regional and marginal rather than national: a Northeast winter with healthy import flows has an easier time meeting demand than one relying only on barrels shipped up from the Gulf Coast, which eases pressure on East Coast stocks and the East Coast retail price specifically. Imports rarely move the national Mont Belvieu benchmark, which is set by the much larger domestic production and export flows.

Product supplied (demand)

Product supplied is EIA's weekly proxy for consumption. It is not a metered reading of what furnaces and industry actually burned; EIA calculates it as a balance: production plus imports, minus the change in stocks, minus exports. What is left over is inferred to have moved through the wholesale system to end users.

Because it is a balancing figure, a single week's number can be noisy, but the trend is the closest weekly read on US propane consumption there is. A spike, from a hard cold snap or a wet corn harvest pulling grain dryers, draws down US stocks and typically firms the Mont Belvieu price within days; the retail price a household pays follows with a longer lag, since dealers buy on contract and carry inventory rather than repricing daily against the hub. A stocks draw that outruns what this line alone would predict usually means exports absorbed the difference.

Exports by destination

The destination tables break the export total down by country, from EIA's monthly international trade data (a roughly two-month reporting lag, coarser than the weekly lines above). They show where US barrels actually go: mostly East Asian and Latin American markets that lack their own gas processing or refining capacity, buying propane for petrochemical feedstock and for residential and commercial heating and cooking alike.

A cold snap or a petrochemical-demand surge in a top destination market lifts that country's buying, which tightens Gulf Coast supply and firms Mont Belvieu the same way any other export surge does. A market this concentrated also means a single large buyer's demand swings move the US wholesale benchmark more than a diffuse customer base would. The buyer list has run fairly stable for years: East Asian economies, led by Japan, China and South Korea, together with Mexico and other Latin American markets, take the large majority of the total. The mix shifts gradually, as new import terminals or petrochemical capacity come online abroad, so the concentration table is worth reading over months, not against any single release.