Talk:West Texas Intermediate

Intermediate?
On another page in the Wikipedia, the classification of "light," "intermediate," or "heavy" is described, and it might reasonably be expected that these terms are mutually exclusive. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that WTI is actually "light" rather than "intermediate." Can someone who knows the ins and outs of this explain the apparent conflicts within the nomenclature, either here on the talk page, or in the article itself? Best wishes, --Brianhill 18:51, 25 April 2007 (UTC)


 * years later and this article still opens with it described as light, then describes it as medium, then describes it as lighter than Brent Crude which is described as light. Very disappointing. TheHYPO (talk) 13:00, 14 April 2019 (UTC)


 * Light sweet crudes typically trade at a premium to heavy sour crudes, so there's a financial incentive to call your crude light sweet, which you can do since there's no set in stone cut off point on the API for what a light crude is. Thus WTI-Cushing is now traded on the NYMEX as the "Light Sweet Crude", or CL for short. What's more is that the name WTI represents a collection of different kinds of crude, CL does this to an even greater extent. As per the EIA light crudes generally have APIs greater than 38, however as per NYMEX regulation WTI purchased can be as low as 37, intermediate as per EIA. This is common, and also true of Brent, if you buy Brent on the open market, you'll most likely receive no Brent but forties instead, because it's heavier and more sour thus cheaper. By the same token Dubai Crude Oil is listed as a Light Sour crude, its API of 31 however would be considered intermediate in the US. This isn't a science. But the sciencey aspect of it is this. Crude is a mixture of mainly hydrocarbon molecules mixed with other stuff, such as a sulfur. Thus methane, gasoline, and diesel are all hydrocarbons, the difference being the length of the molecules, methane is 1 carbon atom with 4 hydrogen, gasoline is generally in the range of 6-12 carbon atoms the number of hydrogen atoms being the number of carbon*2-2, gasoline thus is lighter, stuff like bunker fuel is heavier. Gasoline is more expensive, bunker fuel cheap. Sulfur content is also very hard on refineries making it less desirable. So the money now, and especially in the past was in light sweet crude. So light sweet got developed and extracted to a much greater extent, until the shale boom meaning that every year there was more heavy sour in relation to light sweet. So if a product is needed and hard to get, but you have something similar, what do you do? You change the name of your product. Countries that have heavier crudes, call the ones that aren't so heavy light. To try and get a bit of a premium on it. This is why there are so many definitions on what light crude is, and why its definition has changed over time. And why WTI was called intermediate and now light. Alcibiades979 (talk) 13:36, 18 September 2019 (UTC)

Why is it a benchmark price
I would like to know why WTI crude used as a benchmark in oil pricing and when it became at this attribute?

Date format
There is at least one partial date on this page. Dates should include a year unless it is an anniversary type date


 * No there isn't. I believe you are referring to the May 24 reference, which is in a section headed 2007.  Constantly quoting the year when discussing that year's events is redundant and distracting. 79.77.32.208 (talk) 18:16, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

Relation to W&T Offshore, Inc.?
What's the relation between this WTI and "W&T Offshore, Inc." (NYSE: WTI), which is what Google prominently returns on a search for WTI? 31.18.251.194 (talk) 02:32, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on West Texas Intermediate. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20080311040134/http://www.forbes.com:80/markets/feeds/afx/2007/04/19/afx3630294.html to http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/04/19/afx3630294.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 05:07, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

What exactly is an "assessed price" in the lead sentence?
>[WTI] can refer to the spot price, the futures price, or assessed price for that oil.

I couldn't find anything about this except in the context of property appraisal. Is "assessed price" a real thing in commodity trading/markets? (If so, I think it needs to be clarified in the intro paragraph, if not let's remove it from the lead sentence.) Quohx (talk) 02:33, 31 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Hi Quohx, I took a look into this, and I think that the person who included the term "assessed price" may have been thinking in terms of trading crude oil in an over-the-counter market, and not on a futures exchange such as the NYMEX or ICE. See the following article from S&P Global Platts: https://investorfactbook.spglobal.com/sp-global-platts/sp-global-platts-price-assessments/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-counter_(finance) Jeffreythelibra (talk) 04:12, 4 January 2023 (UTC)