Course
Crude Oil, End to End
From a dead plankton bloom to the pump, the plastic and the aluminium smelter's anode - every handover in between, and who owns the barrel at each one.
The short version
Oil's chain is a sorting story. What comes out of the ground is a mixture nobody can use for anything, and almost all of the value added between the well and the customer comes from separating that mixture, moving it to a plant configured for exactly that mixture, and keeping track of whose barrel it is while it moves. The fragile links are the places where a specific crude can only go to a specific plant through a specific strait - not the wells.
Anyone who wants to understand the oil business as a physical system rather than a price chart: analysts and journalists who have to read EIA and OPEC releases correctly, engineers and commercial staff moving between parts of the chain, students, and readers who followed one of the custody journeys on this site and want the general case behind it.
By the end you should be able to- Explain why a barrel of oil is worth different amounts in different places on the same day, in terms of what the molecule is and which plant can take it.
- Trace a specific crude from reservoir to end use, naming the custodian at each handover.
- Read an API gravity and sulfur figure and say roughly what the barrel can and cannot be made into.
- Describe what happens inside a refinery well enough to explain why one refinery makes money on a crude that loses another refinery money.
- Name the handful of physical chokepoints that matter and say what actually happens when one is constrained.
- Read EIA, OPEC, IEA and JODI numbers without double-counting production, refinery runs and product supplied.
Contents
01The molecule and the rockWhat crude oil is, why it is where it is, and why two barrels with the same name can be worth very different amounts.
02Upstream: finding it and lifting itExploration, what a reserve figure does and does not mean, and the three physically different ways a barrel is brought to surface.
03Midstream: moving the barrelPipelines, blending, storage, tankers and straits - the part of the chain that owns almost none of the value and almost all of the fragility.
04Downstream: taking the barrel apartWhat a refinery physically is, what comes out of a barrel, and the part of the chain where the oil stops being fuel and becomes material.
05Ownership, price and failureWho owns a barrel at each point, how it gets a price, how the risk is laid off, and which links actually break.
- U.S. Energy Information Administrationweekly and annual US supply, refining and stocks
- EIA, Oil and petroleum products explainedrefinery yield per barrel
- International Energy Agency, Oil Market Reportworld demand and supply balances
- OPEC, Monthly Oil Market Reportmember production and quota arrangements
- Joint Organisations Data Initiative (JODI Oil)self-reported national production, refining and stocks
- IMF primary commodity prices, via FREDthe Brent annual averages this site publishes
- CME Group contract specificationswhat a futures contract actually obliges
- Society of Petroleum Engineers, Petroleum Resources Management Systemthe reserves definitions everyone argues about
Educational content only. Nothing in this course is investment, trading, tax or legal advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any commodity, contract or security, or a valuation of any asset. Figures are stated with their reference period and source and are indicative of scale rather than live market quotations; where a range is given, real cases fall outside it. Drafted with AI assistance and editorially reviewed, per the editorial policy. Photographs: 16 from Wikimedia Commons, each credited to its author and licence beneath the picture it appears with.