Oil prices: EIA Brent and WTI spot

What the numbers are

Brent is the seaborne North Sea-linked benchmark EIA publishes as “Europe Brent Spot Price FOB.” WTI is the landlocked US midcontinent benchmark EIA publishes as “Cushing, OK WTI Spot Price FOB,” priced at the Oklahoma storage hub. FOB means each figure is a free-on-board assessment, not a delivered invoice. The two are different barrels in different places, so they do not track each other exactly; this page prints them side by side and does not compute the spread.

The browser here never calls api.eia.gov — that API requires a key — and never reaches FRED directly, because FRED sends no CORS header. Instead a scheduled job fetches the two series each weekday and commits the result to this site as /data/oil-prices.json, which the page then reads from its own origin. Everything above is painted from that file or left as an em dash.

So these are daily figures refreshed daily, not a ticker. If the scheduled job stops running, the panel returns to em dashes after a week rather than printing an ageing number indefinitely.

Why the numbers arrive via FRED

EIA’s own open-data API refuses every request without a registered key. Rather than manage a secret for two public numbers, OilRoutes reads them from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which republishes EIA’s daily spot series unchanged and free of authentication. FRED names EIA as the source on both series pages.

The fetch itself runs in this site’s own build automation on a weekday schedule, so no server sits between FRED and the page — only a committed snapshot with the date it was taken. That snapshot is machine-written from the primary source on every run; no one types a price into it.

This is a delivery path, not a second opinion. The values are EIA’s assessments; no vendor, exchange, or aggregator sits in between, and nothing is re-derived along the way. The as-of line says “EIA via FRED” so the provenance is visible rather than implied. If the two ever disagree, EIA’s table is authoritative and this page is wrong.

One practical consequence: FRED republishes on its own schedule, so the newest print here can trail EIA’s table by a few days. The as-of date always names the observation actually shown — read it before quoting the number.

How MoM and YoY are computed

Percent change is (current − previous) ÷ previous × 100. Month-over-month compares the latest daily print to the nearest earlier daily row about 30 days back (10-day match window). Year-over-year compares to the nearest earlier row about 365 days back (14-day window). Both lookbacks are taken from EIA daily rows only.

That is deliberately not EIA’s published monthly-average table, where weekly, monthly, and annual values are unweighted averages of daily closes. Do not compare a figure here against a monthly-average change without saying which one you mean. If a match window comes back empty — a holiday, a missing print — the field stays an em dash rather than borrowing a neighbouring day. The full derivation lives in how to read EIA Brent and WTI MoM and YoY.

Spot, not futures

EIA spot prices are assessments of prompt physical barrels, published after the fact. Futures are exchange contracts for a later delivery month. A futures widget and this page will disagree, and they should. Nothing here refreshes sub-second, and nothing here is a bid, an ask, or a front-month settle.

Why you may be seeing dashes

On load the panel paints dashes first. It replaces them only when the JSON reports available: true, a source naming EIA, and at least one series with a finite price. Any other shape keeps the dashes and leaves the as-of line reading “EIA unavailable.” Holidays and other gaps in the CSV are dropped rather than interpolated. If you need a number while this page is blank, go to the EIA table directly.

Go to the primary source

• EIA, spot prices for crude oil and petroleum products (daily table): pet_pri_spt
• EIA daily history, Europe Brent Spot Price FOB: RBRTE
• EIA daily history, Cushing, OK WTI Spot Price FOB: RWTC
• FRED daily series, republished from EIA: DCOILBRENTEU (Brent) and DCOILWTICO (WTI)
• EIA open data, the keyed API this page deliberately does not use: eia.gov/opendata

Cite EIA for any figure that appears above — FRED is the delivery path, not the author. Cite OilRoutes only for how this page is wired.

See the same strip on the live tanker map →