Benchmarks
The three most quoted oil products are North America's West Texas Intermediate crude (WTI), Brent Crude from the North Sea, and Dubai Crude from UAE, and their pricing is used as a barometer for the entire petroleum industry, although, in total, there are 46 key oil exporting countries. Brent Crude is typically priced at about $2 over the WTI Spot price, which is typically priced $5 to $6 above the EIA's Imported Refiner Acquisition Cost (IRAC) and OPEC Basket prices. WTI and Brent are quoted FOB specific locations, not FOB the oilfields. For WTI, the delivery point is Cushing, Oklahoma; for Brent, it is Sullom Voe, located in Shetland, an island archipelago north of mainland Scotland.
Although crude oil assays evaluate various chemical properties of the oil, the two most important properties that determine a crude's value are its density (measured as API specific gravity) and its sulphur content (measured per mass). Crude oil is considered "heavy" if it has long hydrocarbon chains, or "light" if it has short hydrocarbon chains: an API gravity of 34 or higher is "light", between 31 and 33 is "medium", and 30 or below is "heavy". Crude is considered "sweet" if it is low in sulphur content (< 0.5%/weight), or "sour" if high (> 1.0%/weight). Generally, the higher the API gravity (the "lighter" it is), the more valuable the crude.
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
