Crude Oil & Natural Gas Pricing: March’s average West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price per barrel increased 9% month on month (m/m). The WTI is up 15% year on year (y/y), coming in at $84.28 / barrel in March 2024 vs. $73.28 / barrel in March 2023.

By comparison, Brent crude increased 2% m/m to $85.41 / barrel in March 2024, and experienced growth of 9% y/y ($78.43 / barrel in March 2023). The WTI and Brent crude oil benchmarks are undergoing similar patterns this month. Additionally in March, the Brent-WTI spread decreased to $1.13.

In addition, we saw the Henry Hub Natural Gas spot price decrease 13% m/m to $1.49 / million Btu. This represents a 35% decrease y/y.

Figure 1 charts the monthly average spot prices of WTI and Brent crude oil, plus the Henry Hub natural gas spot price from 2000 to the present. “We increased our forecast prices for crude oil and petroleum products for the remainder of 2024 following the announcement that OPEC+ will extend the existing voluntary production cuts through the second quarter of 2024. We now forecast significantly less global oil production than world oil consumption through the first half of 2024, requiring draws on world petroleum stocks (inventory). Stock draws tend to increase oil prices.” (eia.gov).

At Gerdau, we routinely monitor the price of oil issued by the Energy Information Administration since it has a direct impact on the cost of shipping and freight. These costs, in addition to the data we follow on oil and gas rotary rig counts, have been shown to impact long product sales.