What's the difference between WTI and Brent?
Two names dominate every oil headline, and they are usually presented as interchangeable. They are not. They are two different barrels, in two different places, priced by two different sets of concerns — and the gap between them is one of the most readable numbers in commodities.
WTI: a landlocked barrel
West Texas Intermediate is a light sweet crude, roughly 40° API with under 0.5% sulphur. The CME futures contract covers 1,000 barrels and is physically delivered at Cushing, Oklahoma — an inland pipeline junction with a large tank farm, about as far from a coastline as a major oil hub can be.
That geography is the whole personality of the contract. A WTI price answers the question "what is a barrel worth in a tank in Oklahoma?" — which depends on US shale production upstream, on the pipeline capacity from Cushing down to the Gulf Coast, and on how full the Cushing tanks currently are.
Brent: a seaborne barrel
Brent is not one field. It is a basket of North Sea grades — Brent, Forties, Oseberg, Ekofisk and Troll (the "BFOET" complex) — and since June 2023 the Dated Brent assessment also includes WTI Midland crude delivered into north-west Europe. The ICE futures contract is cash-settled against the ICE Brent Index rather than delivered into a tank.
Brent's barrel is waterborne. It is loaded onto a tanker and can go anywhere in the world that will pay for it. So a Brent price answers a global question: "what is a barrel worth on a ship?" — driven by seaborne supply, freight rates, OPEC+ policy, and geopolitical risk to shipping lanes. Brent is the reference for the majority of internationally traded crude for exactly this reason.
Reading the spread
From the late 1980s, when Brent became a traded benchmark, until about 2010 WTI traded slightly above Brent — it is the lighter, sweeter barrel, so it should. Then US shale production surged while the export ban was still in force and the pipelines to the Gulf were full. Crude piled up at Cushing with nowhere to go, and WTI fell to a discount of more than $20 a barrel below Brent at points in 2011–2013.
Two things fixed it: the US crude export ban was lifted in December 2015, and pipeline capacity from Cushing to the Gulf Coast expanded. Since then the discount has typically compressed to roughly the cost of getting a Cushing barrel onto a ship bound for Europe.
Work the arbitrage once and the number stops being mysterious. Suppose:
- Pipeline Cushing → US Gulf Coast: $1.50 a barrel
- Terminal and loading: $0.60
- Freight, Gulf Coast → north-west Europe: $2.40
- Total cost to relocate the barrel: $4.50
If Brent minus WTI is $6.00, a trader buys at Cushing, sells forward in Europe, moves the barrel, and keeps $1.50. Enough people do that, the flow tightens the spread back toward $4.50, and it stops. If the spread is $3.00, nothing moves and the barrels stay home.
So the Brent–WTI spread is mostly a transport-economics number, not a verdict on quality. When it widens sharply, the usual explanation is a bottleneck — a pipeline outage, full storage, or a freight-rate spike — rather than a change of view about oil.
The third benchmark
A large share of the world's crude is neither light nor sweet nor sold to the West. Dubai/Oman is the medium sour benchmark for Middle Eastern crude sold into Asia, and cargoes heading east are commonly priced against it while cargoes heading west price off Brent. Three benchmarks, three regions, one commodity — Unit 1's rule, made concrete.
In the data
The two benchmarks are two separate price series, and each one's name says which barrel it is: WTI at Cushing, Oklahoma, and Brent in Europe. Their three newest months are below.
Both are in dollars per barrel, so subtracting one month from the same month is a legitimate Brent-minus-WTI spread. The daily versions do not cover the same days: on 29 September 2026 the WTI history held 10,250 daily prices and the Brent one 9,982. Match them date by date, never row by row, or the spread will be offset by a day in places and nothing will warn you.
Try it now
- Five years of each benchmark are below. Pick three dates spread across the window and write down the Brent-minus-WTI difference at each. What you are after is the widest and the narrowest: the spread has a range of its own, and it is much smaller than either price's.
- Drop a Level at today's price on each chart, then switch both to Monthly bars. The lines stay where you put them, so you can see at a glance how much of five years sat above and below today on each side of the Atlantic — and whether the two answers agree. Check your widest reading against the arithmetic above: is it roughly the width of the "normal" range, or well outside it?
- Say the distinction once: WTI is a tank in Oklahoma, Brent is a ship in the North Sea. Everything else follows from those two pictures. Nothing here is a view on which one does what next.