After much anticipation, both the preliminary antidumping and countervailing duties on hot-rolled coil have been announced by the Department of Commerce.  This high profile trade case has the potential to send steel prices soaring for many items that energy companies purchase. So how will these developments impact you?

Read on to learn what’s happened with hot-rolled coil and to receive a list of suppliers that are most impacted by these new duties.

With oil prices tanking and project competition rising, it's no secret that midstream projects are under pressure.

That's why we hosted a recent webinar, A Guide to Midstream Project Benchmarking, which shared how leading midstream firms are driving project competitiveness and capital efficiency.

In it, we share:

• Why benchmarking is the key to competitiveness
• Specific best practices for benchmarking your projects
• Actual example outputs other midstream firms are building to

More than 65 midstream professionals registered to watch us live, and now we're bringing the recording directly to you: just scroll down to view. 

Questions? Just reach out to us directly at costinsights@poweradvocate.com

The midstream landscape has drastically changed in the last year: with commodity markets plummeting and E&P investment declining, the industry's entered a new and uncertain world. As 2016 fast approaches, PowerAdvocate has rounded up the top 4 trends every midstream executive should be watching to make sense of the new environment:

The steel market's been good to Oil & Gas firms in the last year, but a storm is brewing and prices could rise by 70+% over the next year. Are you prepared?

More than 20 of North America's largest Oil & Gas firms joined us live for our webinar: Weathering the Storm in Steel.

Now you can join them too and learn:

• Why the steel market's in trouble
• What leading O&G firms are doing to prepare
• How you can develop a risk mitigation strategy

Click here to view the webinar

This post is part of our "5 Steps to Preventing Cost Overruns" series. Click here to start from the beginning.

If you're anything like the rest of us, you can't see into the future.

So when you're creating a project estimate that requires you to predict future project costs, how can you ever get it right?

With a delicate balance between great data and a healthy dose of realism, it is possible to develop a scientific approach to accounting for changes in market conditions over time and ultimately creating more accurate project estimates.

What's the fundamental problem of accurate project estimation? New projects aren't like old ones.

Even when you have great historical project data and high-quality market data to inform your estimates, it's impossible to compare projects that differ from one another unless you have a systematic way to account for those differences in your estimates.

We've conducted rigorous statistical analyses and come up with 12 cost drivers that, when taken together, can affect project costs by >140% even after accounting for diameter, mileage, and escalation. In this week's post, we show you how to do that analysis yourself and come up with the cost driver variables that make sense for your company.

Accurate estimates allow midstream companies to make investment decisions with full visibility into their consequences, when there’s still time to set clear expectations for expected rates of return or to deploy capital through more productive avenues. But when estimates are too low, the possibility of cost overruns remains hidden until significant amounts of capital have already been sunk into the initial phases of a project.

In our peer learning series, we search for the best insights for the midstream industry from outside the midstream industry, with the goal of facilitating inter-industry learning and bringing the innovation of your peers to bear on your daily challenges.  In this week’s installment, you’ll learn about the 5 insights the private sector can gain from the GAO’s guide to cost estimating best practices.