The spread between Brent and WTI always has been a key industry benchmark. Traditionally, WTI was more than Brent, but this is no longer the case. In fact, WTI has now declined to about $5/b less than Brent, a tremendously wide gap.

It's not hard to figure out why. Given the continued increase of Canadian oil sands output, as well as North Dakota crude production, and the increase in available storage at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point of the New York Mercantile Exchange crude contract, WTI's values have sunk. It's discussed by Platts' senior analyst Linda Rafield in this week's review of the weekly American Petroleum Institute and Energy Information Agency statistics.

 

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