Crude Oil & Natural Gas Pricing: March’s average West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price per barrel decreased 5% month on month (m/m). The WTI is down 32% year on year (y/y), coming in at $73.28 / barrel in March 2023 vs. $108.50 / barrel in March 2022.

By comparison, Brent crude decreased 5% m/m to $78.43 / barrel in March 2023, and experienced shrinking of -33% y/y ($ 117.25 / barrel in March 2022). The WTI and Brent crude oil benchmarks are undergoing similar patterns this month. Additionally in March, the Brent-WTI spread decreased to $5.15.

In addition, we saw the Henry Hub Natural Gas spot price decrease 3% m/m to $2.31 / million Btu. This represents a 53% 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 present. “The growth in U.S. crude oil exports in 2022 was driven by increased U.S. crude oil production, releases from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and increased global demand for alternatives to Russia’s crude oil.” (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.