PETROEYES

Research library

Oil and Gas Deep Dives

PetroEyes publishes 82 long-form explainers on how oil and gas markets are measured and priced. Each one is built from primary sources, mainly the US Energy Information Administration, OPEC, the International Energy Agency, national regulators and statistical agencies, and each figure carries the month it was last checked.

How this library is organized

The explainers are grouped into nine research areas. Start with the benchmarks if a headline says "oil prices" and you want to know which price it means. Use the data guides when a weekly or monthly report is about to move the market and you want to read the table yourself rather than rely on a summary. The fuel-price and household sections follow the barrel downstream to what drivers and households pay, including why that bill differs from one state, province or season to the next. The natural gas and supply sections cover the wholesale gas market, OPEC+ policy, refinery capacity and trade flows. Three newer sections compare fuels that look alike, follow US oil production and the emergency reserve, and set long-run fuel prices out in constant dollars.

None of these pages is trading advice. They explain how the numbers are produced, what they include and leave out, and where readers most often misread them. For live numbers, the WTI price page, Henry Hub page, rig count tracker and city gas price map carry the latest values with their source dates, and the topic hubs connect these explainers to the matching data pages.

Crude benchmarks and spreads

How WTI, Brent and Canadian heavy crude are priced, where they are delivered, and what the spreads between them say about pipelines, ships and quality.

Reading the energy data

Line-by-line guides to the weekly, monthly and annual reports that move oil and gas prices, from the EIA Wednesday report to the OPEC and EIA monthly outlooks.

Refined fuel prices

What sits inside the price of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, propane and heating oil, from the crude barrel to the refinery margin and the retail layer.

Household fuel costs by place and season

Why the same fuel costs more in one state, province or month than another: taxes, fuel specifications, distance from refineries, and the seasonal switch.

Natural gas from the hub to the bill

How the Henry Hub price, storage and pipelines reach a household gas bill, and why the bill rarely moves in step with the wholesale price.

Supply, trade and refining

Where US and world oil comes from and goes: shale basins, OPEC+ policy and membership, spare capacity, the Strait of Hormuz, refinery capacity, imports and exports.

Fuel identity and substitutes

Fuels that look alike at the pump or in the tank can differ in the rules attached to them. The guides in this section compare heating oil with diesel, kerosene with heating oil, E15 with the 87-octane gasoline it is often confused with, and renewable diesel with biodiesel. Each sets the fuels side by side using the governing specification and the agency rules, shows what can and cannot be swapped for what, and prices the difference per gallon and per million Btu from dated EIA data. The aim is to answer the questions behind searches like whether a diesel engine can burn heating oil, whether kerosene belongs in a heating oil tank, or whether E15 is the same as 87, from EPA, IRS, EIA and ASTM sources rather than a dealer blog. Where an agency sets a rule, the page names it and the date it was checked, and where an engine, boiler, heater or tank is involved the manufacturer’s nameplate and manual still govern.

US oil supply and demand

How much crude oil the United States produces, where it is produced, how much petroleum it uses, and how much it holds in reserve. The guides in this section rebuild the national balance sheet from EIA supply-and-disposition data, rank every producing state and offshore area from 2010 to 2025, and follow the Strategic Petroleum Reserve week by week through the 2026 exchanges. They reconcile numbers that differ by source, such as the Texas Railroad Commission’s oil-well crude and the EIA’s state total, and they define the terms that headlines blur: net exporter, product supplied, processing gain and days of import cover. Two further guides read the EIA year-end proved reserves ledger against the larger technically recoverable resource, and the Dallas Fed survey of the oil price a new shale well needs. Each page carries dated tables, names the EIA or DOE series behind them and states the limits of the measure. None of them forecasts a price, and they connect to the import, export and inventory guides in the supply and data-literacy sections, which cover the same system from other angles.

Price history tables

Long-run fuel prices, set out as dated tables rather than charts, so a figure can be read, checked and reused. The guides in this section cover gasoline by year, crude oil by year, and heating oil and propane by winter. Each starts from an official EIA series, names the series and the date it was checked, and then does the arithmetic most price-history pages skip: converting nominal prices to constant dollars with the BLS consumer price index, ranking years in real terms, counting how often a price crossed a threshold, and, for gasoline, measuring a gallon in minutes of work at average hourly earnings. The tables state their base month, unit and averaging rule in plain terms. They describe what prices were, not what they will be, and none is a forecast or a recommendation about any security.