Where the data comes from
- Live futures (WTI, Brent, natural gas, RBOB, heating oil) — Yahoo Finance front-month contracts, refreshed every 5 minutes.
- WTI forward curve — Yahoo Finance monthly CL contracts (the next nine deliveries), refreshed every 5 minutes.
- US Weekly Petroleum Status & Market Indicators — U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) open-data API: crude, gasoline and distillate stocks, refinery utilization, field production and Lower-48 natural-gas storage. EIA publishes weekly (petroleum Wednesdays, gas Thursdays); we re-check hourly.
- Global crude benchmarks — scraped hourly from public OilPrice.com price tables.
- Strategic petroleum reserves — the US row auto-updates from the EIA SPR series (WCSSTUS1); other countries are hand-curated from each agency's published figures (IEA, METI, KNOC, PPAC and others), with the source linked on every row.
- News — RSS headlines from EIA, OilPrice, Rigzone, BBC, FT Energy and Hellenic Shipping; sentiment and category tags are derived automatically from the headline text.
Prices are indicative and may be delayed up to 15 minutes. This site is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice.
Key terms
- WTI vs. Brent
- WTI (West Texas Intermediate) is the US light-sweet crude benchmark priced at Cushing, Oklahoma; Brent is the international North Sea benchmark. The Brent–WTI spread reflects transport, quality and regional supply differences.
- 3:2:1 crack spread
- A proxy for refining margin: the value of 2 barrels of gasoline plus 1 barrel of distillate produced from 3 barrels of crude, expressed in $/bbl. Wider cracks signal stronger refining economics.
- Contango & backwardation
- The shape of the futures curve. Backwardation (front prices above later months) signals tight prompt supply; contango (later months higher) signals ample supply and rewards storage.
- EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report
- The most market-moving weekly US dataset — crude and product inventories, refinery runs and production. A larger-than-expected inventory build is typically bearish for crude; a draw is bullish.
- Days of import cover
- How many days a country's strategic reserve would cover its net oil imports — the standard comparable measure of reserve adequacy (the IEA obligation is 90 days).