On April 20th, 2020, the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil slumped into negative for the first time in history, falling to negative 37.63 U.S. dollars per barrel. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has had a catastrophic impact on the global oil and gas industry. Declining consumer demand and high levels of production output are threatening to exceed oil storage capacities, which resulted in the lowest ever oil prices noted between April 20th and April 22nd.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Fact and Figures page.

On October 27, 2025, the Brent crude oil price stood at 65.14 U.S. dollars per barrel, compared to 61.31 U.S. dollars for WTI oil and 67.54 U.S. dollars for the OPEC basket. Oil prices rose slightly that week.Europe's Brent crude oil, the U.S. WTI crude oil, and OPEC's basket are three of the most important benchmarks used by traders as reference for global oil and gasoline prices. Lowest ever oil prices during coronavirus pandemic In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic resulted in crude oil prices hitting a major slump as oil demand drastically declined following lockdowns and travel restrictions. Initial outlooks and uncertainty surrounding the course of the pandemic brought about a disagreement between two of the largest oil producers, Russia and Saudi Arabia, in early March. Bilateral talks between global oil producers ended in agreement on April 13th, with promises to cut petroleum output and hopes rising that these might help stabilize the oil price in the coming weeks. However, with storage facilities and oil tankers quickly filling up, fears grew over where to store excess oil, leading to benchmark prices seeing record negative prices between April 20 and April 22, 2020. How crude oil prices are determined As with most commodities, crude oil prices are impacted by supply and demand, as well as inventories and market sentiment. However, as oil is most often traded in future contracts (where a contract is agreed upon while product delivery will follow in the next two to three months), market speculation is one of the principal determinants for oil prices. Traders make conclusions on how production output and consumer demand will likely develop over the coming months, leaving room for uncertainty. Spot prices differ from futures in so far as they reflect the current market price of a commodity.

Crude Oil fell to 59.17 USD/Bbl on December 2, 2025, down 0.25% from the previous day. Over the past month, Crude Oil's price has fallen 3.08%, and is down 15.40% compared to the same time last year, according to trading on a contract for difference (CFD) that tracks the benchmark market for this commodity. Crude Oil - values, historical data, forecasts and news - updated on December of 2025.

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The crude oil market has the potential to grow by 4781.60 million barrels during 2021-2025, and the market’s growth momentum will decelerate at a CAGR of 2.73%.

This crude oil market research report provides valuable insights on the post COVID-19 impact on the market, which will help companies evaluate their business approaches. Furthermore, this report extensively covers market segmentation by production area (onshore and offshore) and geography (APAC, North America, Europe, MEA, and South America). The report also offers information on several market vendors, including BP Plc, Chevron Corp., and ConocoPhillips Co., among others.

What will the Crude Oil Market Size be in 2021?

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Crude Oil Market: Key Drivers and Trends

Based on our research output, there has been a negative impact on the market growth during and post COVID-19 era. The increasing upstream investment is notably driving the crude oil market growth, although factors such as fluctuations in global crude oil prices may impede market growth. To unlock information on the key market drivers and the COVID-19 pandemic impact on the crude oil industry get your FREE report sample now.

      The rising energy demand across the world has prompted governments to explore untapped oil and gas resources in the upstream sector, using advanced technologies.
      The production of oil and natural gas is declining from many conventional oilfields. To overcome this issue, oil and gas operators are increasing investments in mature oil and gas fields.
      The adoption of unconventional exploration and production technologies in large shale deposits has widened opportunities for upstream oil and gas companies.
      The growing investments in the upstream oil and gas sector will significantly influence crude oil market growth over the forecast period.




      Technological development in the hydraulic fracturing process is aiding in the exploration and production of oil and gas from shale plays.
      The advances in the drilling technology and proppant placement in downhole wells increased hydrocarbon recovery from unconventional wells.
      Technological advances such as integration of the internet of things (IoT) for data acquisition, as well as the use of data analytics and machine learning, supports the efficiency of tools that is one of the key crude oil market trends.
      Real-time pressure data is crucial in crude oil production as it eliminates the over-fracturing issue.
      Automation of hydraulic fracturing optimizes the hydraulic fracturing method using algorithmic controls and supports enhanced well performance.

This crude oil market analysis report also provides detailed information on other upcoming trends and challenges that will have a far-reaching effect on the market growth. Get detailed insights on the trends and challenges, which will help companies evaluate and develop growth strategies.

Who are the Major Crude Oil Market Vendors?

The report analyzes the market’s competitive landscape and offers information on several market vendors, including:

BP Plc
Chevron Corp.
ConocoPhillips Co.
Exxon Mobil Corp.
PetroChina Co. Ltd.
Petroleo Brasileiro SA
Qatar Petroleum
Rosneft Oil Co.
Royal Dutch Shell Plc
Saudi Arabian Oil Co.

The crude oil market is fragmented and the vendors are deploying various organic and inorganic growth strategies to compete in the market. Click here to uncover other successful business strategies deployed by the vendors.

To make the most of the opportunities and recover from post COVID-19 impact, market vendors should focus more on the growth prospects in the fast-growing segments, while maintaining their positions in the slow-growing segments.

Download a free sample of the crude oil market forecast report for insights on complete key vendor profiles. The profiles include information on the production, sustainability, and prospects of the leading companies.

Which are the Key Regions for Crude Oil Market?

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44% of the market’s growth will originate from APAC during the forecast period. China, India, and Japan are the key markets for crude oil in APAC. Market growth in this region will be faster than the growth of the market in Europe, North America, and South America.

To garner further competitive intelligence and regional opportunities in store for vendors, view our sample report.

What are the Revenue-generating Production Area Segments in the Crude Oil Market?

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The crude oil market share growth by the onshore segment will be significant during the forecast period. In onshore exploration and production operations

View market daily updates and historical trends for WTI Crude Oil Spot Price. Source: Energy Information Administration. Track economic data with YCharts …

The average spot price for West Texas Intermediate crude oil came to 76.63 U.S. dollars per barrel in 2024, a decrease of nearly one U.S. dollars compared to the previous year. The 2024 average spot price for Brent crude oil was 80.52 U.S. dollars. Both Brent and WTI are light crude oils, with the first used as a benchmark for gasoline prices around the world. Spot prices vs. future prices Spot prices refer to current market prices under which a commodity such as one barrel of crude oil may be bought for immediate delivery. In contrast, future prices refer to settlement and delivery at a later date. As a major refinery and storage hub, Cushing in Oklahoma is the delivery location for WTI traded via the New York Mercantile Exchange. When storage capacities threatened to reach their maximum capacity in April 2020, the WTI oil price crashed as a result, trading at record low prices. The WTI oil price fell into negative numbers for the first time in its history, closing out at negative 37.63 U.S. dollars per barrel on April 20th. The lowest value for Brent prices was 19.33 U.S. dollars per barrel. Influences on oil prices Oil prices are volatile commodities as their trading and delivery is heavily influenced by overall market development and geopolitical events. For example, the Russia-Ukraine war and resulting Russian sanctions brought about fears of supply bottlenecks, which pushed oil prices to decade-highs also reflected in the 2022 annual average.

Oil shocks exert influence on macroeconomic activity through various channels, many of which imply a symmetric effect. However, the effect can also be asymmetric. In particular, sharp oil price changes "either increases or decreases" may reduce aggregate output temporarily because they delay business investment by raising uncertainty or induce costly sectoral resource reallocation. Consistent with these asymmetric-effect hypotheses, the authors find that a volatility measure constructed using daily crude oil futures prices has a negative and significant effect on future gross domestic product (GDP) growth over the period 1984-2004. Moreover, the effect becomes more significant after oil price changes are also included in the regression to control for the symmetric effect. The evidence here provides economic rationales for Hamilton's (2003) nonlinear oil shock measure: It captures overall effects, both symmetric and asymmetric, of oil price shocks on output.

Stocks of crude oil in the United States increased by 2.77million barrels in the week ending November 21 of 2025. This dataset provides the latest reported value for - United States Crude Oil Stocks Change - plus previous releases, historical high and low, short-term forecast and long-term prediction, economic calendar, survey consensus and news.

Scope: Brent crude and refined products narrative intelligence, events, forecasting, and fundamental indices. Sources: ~50,000+ news/articles & market events/day (deduped), structured in milliseconds. Update cadence: Real-time; weekly roll-ups; 6-month forecasts on refresh. Use cases: Signal discovery, event monitoring, price commentary, scenario analysis, model calibration, risk. Entities & grain MarketCommentary — 1 per asset/period; narrative paragraph(s). WeeklyRoundup — 1 per week per asset; week-level narrative. Event — real-time; one row per detected story/event instance. Forecast — point-in-time forecast set (current price, expected, range, path). FundamentalIndex — time series at hourly cadence (or higher) across indexed factors. Key fields & semantics Timestamps are ISO-8601 UTC. Prices in USD by default (field includes currency). Sentiment: {Positive, Negative, Neutral}. Scope: {ASSET, MACRO, SECTOR} (extensible). Importance: integer scale (1–5 recommended).

Some analysts and economists recently warned that the United States economy faces a much higher risk of recession should the price of oil rise to $100 per barrel or more. In February 2008, spot crude oil prices closed above $100 per barrel for the first time ever, and since then they have climbed even higher. Meanwhile, according to some surveys of economists, it is highly probable that a recession began in the United States in late 2007 or early 2008. Although the findings in this paper are consistent with the view that the United States economy has become much less sensitive to large changes in oil prices, a simple forecasting exercise using Hamilton's model augmented with the first principal component of 85 macroeconomic variables reveals that a permanent increase in the price of crude oil to $150 per barrel by the end of 2008 could have a significant negative effect on the growth rate of real gross domestic product in the short run. Moreover, the model also predicts that such an increase in oil prices would produce much higher overall and core inflation rates in 2009 than most policymakers expect.

This data set is tweets from a very unusual day on which oil price went NEGATIVE! Twitter as usual could not stop talking about it. The data has been extracted from Twitter and columns are self explanatory attributes of the tweet. I have performed data cleaning, preprocessing and sentiment analysis on these tweets which can serve as a guiding example for anybody who wants to transform any twitter data into sentiment analysis worthy data. I am an MBA student with an engineering background who is fascinated by data. This is my first upload here so leave an upvote if you can :)

This dataset contains the predicted prices of the asset CRUDE OIL BRENT (Zedcex) over the next 16 years. This data is calculated initially using a default 5 percent annual growth rate, and after page load, it features a sliding scale component where the user can then further adjust the growth rate to their own positive or negative projections. The maximum positive adjustable growth rate is 100 percent, and the minimum adjustable growth rate is -100 percent.

Context

Abstract of associated article: This paper contributes to the debate on the role of oil prices in predicting stock returns. The novelty of the paper is that it considers monthly time-series historical data that span over 150years (1859:10–2013:12) and applies a predictive regression model that accommodates three salient features of the data, namely, a persistent and endogenous oil price, and model heteroscedasticity. Three key findings are unraveled: first, oil price predicts US stock returns. Second, in-sample evidence is corroborated by out-sample evidence of predictability. Third, both positive and negative oil price changes are important predictors of US stock returns, with negative changes relatively more important. Our results are robust to the use of different estimators and choice of in-sample periods.

Acknowledgements

Narayan, Paresh K. (2016), “Data for: Has oil price predicted stock returns for over a century? ”, Mendeley Data, V1, doi: 10.17632/7s446mxhyv.1

License - CC by NC 3.0

Vietnam Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data was reported at 0.000 Barrel/kton in Jan 2025. This stayed constant from the previous number of 0.000 Barrel/kton for Dec 2024. Vietnam Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data is updated monthly, averaging 0.000 Barrel/kton from Jan 2002 (Median) to Jan 2025, with 277 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 7,548.000 Barrel/kton in Apr 2010 and a record low of 0.000 Barrel/kton in Jan 2025. Vietnam Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Joint Organisations Data Initiative. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Vietnam – Table VN.JODI.WDB: Energy Balance: Oil. Including lease condensate; Stock changes: Closing stock level (end of month) minus opening stock level (start of month). A positive number corresponds to a stock build, a negative number corresponds to a stock draw.

North Macedonia Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data was reported at 0.000 Barrel th in Jan 2025. This stayed constant from the previous number of 0.000 Barrel th for Dec 2024. North Macedonia Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data is updated monthly, averaging 0.000 Barrel th from Jan 2002 (Median) to Jan 2025, with 277 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 0.000 Barrel th in Jan 2025 and a record low of -14.740 Barrel th in Jul 2014. North Macedonia Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Joint Organisations Data Initiative. The data is categorized under Global Database’s North Macedonia – Table MK.JODI.WDB: Energy Balance: Oil. Including lease condensate; Stock changes: Closing stock level (end of month) minus opening stock level (start of month). A positive number corresponds to a stock build, a negative number corresponds to a stock draw.

The author argues that the economic benefits of low gasoline prices for the U.S. economy have fallen substantially since the reemergence of America as a major oil producer. The old rule-of thumb that a 10% fall in the oil price raises inflation-adjusted U.S. GDP by 0.2% is too large—the impact on economic activity should be closer to zero, and may even be negative if consumption grows slowly. The reasons for this change are straightforward, if underappreciated: (i) the value of oil production accounts for a larger share of the U.S. economy; and (ii) consumers are not spending the windfall like they used to because of higher debt levels, limited access to credit, slow wage rowth, and an older population.

Chile Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data was reported at 699.000 Barrel th in Feb 2025. This records an increase from the previous number of -524.250 Barrel th for Jan 2025. Chile Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data is updated monthly, averaging 0.000 Barrel th from Jan 2002 (Median) to Feb 2025, with 278 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 1,321.110 Barrel th in Sep 2007 and a record low of -1,530.810 Barrel th in May 2011. Chile Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Joint Organisations Data Initiative. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Chile – Table CL.JODI.WDB: Energy Balance: Oil. Including lease condensate; Stock changes: Closing stock level (end of month) minus opening stock level (start of month). A positive number corresponds to a stock build, a negative number corresponds to a stock draw.

Geopolitical risks (GPR) can affect the prices of natural resources, which are crucial for survival and sustainable economies. Based on the TVP-VAR-BK models, this paper examines the asymmetric risk contagion between geopolitical risk, bulk energy, and chemical commodity from a time-frequency perspective. The results show that the risk contagion of geopolitical risks, bulk energy and chemical commodity markets has time-varying asymmetry and periodicity, and is susceptible to extreme events. Furthermore, the main driving factor is high-frequency spillover, which has “short-term fragility”, that is, the risk spillover in the short term is more significant than in the medium and long term, and network spillover is mainly caused by negative risk changes. In addition, the bulk energy market is the main risk transmitter, while the chemical commodity market is the main risk receiver. The risk contagion of crude oil on bitumen markets is the most significant. Finally, as a downstream market of the crude oil industry, the chemical commodity market not only directly accepts risk contagion from the crude oil market, but also transmits risks along the “bulk energy - geopolitical risk - chemical commodity” path. This evidence has important implications for governments and regulators in taking steps to prevent extreme spillover effects and a series of chain reactions from geopolitical risks.

The United States net petroleum import volume amounted to a negative 2.34 million barrels per day in 2024. The North American country became a net exporter of petroleum in 2020, when its net import volume reached a negative 651 thousand barrels per day. During the displayed period net imports have decreased notably, having reached a peak of 12.55 million barrels per day in 2005. Following the advent of unconventional shale extraction, the U.S. was able to achieve a trade surplus.

Nigeria Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data was reported at -8,884.000 Barrel th in Feb 2025. This records a decrease from the previous number of 2,978.000 Barrel th for Jan 2025. Nigeria Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data is updated monthly, averaging 251.500 Barrel th from Jan 2002 (Median) to Feb 2025, with 278 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 19,907.000 Barrel th in Jan 2006 and a record low of -18,284.000 Barrel th in Feb 2006. Nigeria Energy Balance: Primary: Total Crude: Crude Oil: Stock Change data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by Joint Organisations Data Initiative. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Nigeria – Table NG.JODI.WDB: Energy Balance: Oil. Including lease condensate; Stock changes: Closing stock level (end of month) minus opening stock level (start of month). A positive number corresponds to a stock build, a negative number corresponds to a stock draw.