Crude Oil & Natural Gas Pricing: March’s average West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil price per barrel increased 18% month on month (m/m) – its third consecutive increase. The WTI is up 74% year on year (y/y), coming in at $108.50 / barrel in March 2022 vs. $62.33 / barrel in March 2021.

By comparison, Brent crude also increased 21% m/m to $117.25 / barrel in March 2022, and experienced growth of +79% y/y ($65.41 / barrel in March 2021). The WTI and Brent crude oil benchmarks are undergoing very similar patterns this month. Additionally in March, the Brent-WTI spread reached $8.75, the largest since December 2019.

In addition, we saw the Henry Hub Natural Gas spot price increase 4% m/m to $4.90 / million Btu. This represents a 87% increase 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. Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24—as well as trade disruptions, sanctions, and private sector divestments from doing business in Russia—continued to contribute to substantial uncertainty in petroleum markets during March (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.