Direct answer
What are Brent and WTI on OilRoutes? They are EIA daily crude spot series, not live futures. Brent is Europe Brent Spot Price FOB (series RBRTE). WTI is Cushing, OK WTI Spot Price FOB (series RWTC). Both live on EIA’s petroleum spot table (pet_pri_spt). This site does not hardcode dollar prices in HTML.
OilRoutes is a tanker map first. The price strip is a context line, not a trading terminal. The browser never calls api.eia.gov — that API refuses requests without a registered key. It only asks the same Cloudflare Worker that proxies AIS for GET /oil-prices, and the Worker reads the series from FRED, which publishes them without a key. Until that Worker URL is wired in js/ais-config.js, the strip is supposed to look empty. That is fail-closed design, documented in how the map works.
Read the official table when you need a number. This note will not paste one. The current prints, when the Worker is answering, sit on the prices page.
See the strip on the live map →
Brent and WTI, as EIA defines the spots
Brent is the seaborne North Sea-linked benchmark EIA publishes as “Europe Brent Spot Price FOB,” series RBRTE, in dollars per barrel.1 WTI is the landlocked US midcontinent benchmark EIA publishes as “Cushing, OK WTI Spot Price FOB,” series RWTC, also dollars per barrel.2 FOB means the published spot is a free-on-board assessment, not a delivered-to-refinery invoice.
They are not the same barrel. Brent is the usual global seaborne reference. WTI is the usual US inland reference, priced at the Cushing, Oklahoma, storage hub. The spread between them moves with regional supply, pipeline space, and export capacity. OilRoutes does not compute or display that spread. It shows each series, or an em dash, independently.
EIA’s glossary and spot notes are the definitions that matter here, not a desk’s nickname for a futures month.3 If the strip ever shows a price, the as-of line should read like a dated EIA print, not “live.”
Check whether the map strip is live EIA or dashes →
MoM and YoY are a formula, not a stored dollar
Direct answer
How does OilRoutes calculate MoM and YoY? Percent change is (current − previous) ÷ previous × 100. Month-over-month finds a daily spot about 30 days before the latest print (10-day match window). Year-over-year finds a print about 365 days earlier (14-day window). No neighbor, no percent — the client shows an em dash.
Write the ratio with symbols, not with a fake example price:
- Let
Ptbe the latest daily EIA spot the Worker accepted as a finite number. - Let
Pt−30dbe the nearest earlier daily row within ten days oft − 30days. - Let
Pt−365dbe the nearest earlier daily row within fourteen days oft − 365days. - MoM percent =
(Pt − Pt−30d) / Pt−30d × 100. - YoY percent =
(Pt − Pt−365d) / Pt−365d × 100.
If previous is missing or zero, the Worker returns no percent and the client prints MoM — or YoY —. Positive percents gain a plus; negatives use a minus sign. That is the entire arithmetic. There is no seasonal adjustment and no futures back-adjustment.
Two cautions follow from using daily spots. First, “month” here is a ~30-day lookback, not EIA’s published monthly average table. EIA says its weekly, monthly, and annual spots are unweighted averages of daily closes on the same pet_pri_spt family.1 Do not mix this site’s MoM with a monthly-average MoM without saying so. Second, holidays leave gaps. The match window exists so a weekend or missing print does not invent a neighbor. If the window is empty, the honest output is a dash.
Read MoM and YoY only if the strip is populated →
Spot is not the futures tape
Direct answer
Is the OilRoutes strip a live futures quote? No. EIA spots are assessed prices for prompt physical barrels, published after the fact. Futures are exchange contracts for a later delivery month. A flashing futures widget and an EIA daily spot will disagree, and they should.
People say “Brent” and “WTI” for at least three different objects: the physical grades, the EIA (or other agency) spot series, and the ICE or NYMEX futures. OilRoutes only ever means the first two, and only the EIA series, and only when the Worker answers. It will not show a bid, an ask, a front-month settle, or a live tick.
If you need the EIA number, open the table rather than scraping this sentence. Daily history for the same series lives on EIA’s leaf pages for RBRTE and RWTC, and in FRED’s republished copies.425
The map strip is spots or dashes, not futures →
The strip fails closed until the Worker key
Direct answer
Why does the strip show em dashes? Fail-closed. Until the Worker URL is wired in js/ais-config.js, or if the Worker cannot reach FRED, every field is an em dash and the as-of line reads “EIA unavailable.” That is a missing URL or a failed fetch — not a hidden price.
On load, the client paints dashes first, then replaces them only if the JSON says available: true, a source naming EIA, and at least one series has a finite price. Any other shape — no URL, HTTP error, empty CSV, parse failure — keeps the dashes. The Worker itself returns an unavailable payload when FRED returns nothing usable. Nobody on this site is authorized to type a dollar amount into the strip to “look finished.”
Demo Mode on the AIS socket is a different switch. Simulated hulls can appear while the price strip is still blank, or the reverse, once keys are split across secrets. Do not treat a demo fleet as a reason to invent a Brent print. How to read live AIS covers that split.
Cite EIA for any spot that actually appears. Cite OilRoutes only for how the strip is wired. Never cite this article as a price.