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Oil Price – historical data

[Update 16 October 2014] See Oil Price – historical data (update) for latest tips.

The oil price is the Financial Times (FT) headline today, so an appropriate day to update details of which library databases provide oil price.

BloombergThe FT front page world markets summary includes two crude oil benchmarks: WTI (West Texas Intermediate) and Brent. Historic data is available for these from several sources.

Bloomberg has the greatest detail of commodity trading and related news. Datastream (graph below), FactSet ExcelConnect and Global Financial Data also have these benchmark oil prices.

There are some websites with oil price information, for example, http://www.oil-price.net/index.php?lang=en and http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_spt_s1_d.htm. However, most provide graphs over different time frames rather than access to the  underlying data.

Chart of benchmark crude oil prices 2005-2010.

Oil Price chart from Datastream

Thomson Reuters Chart created and exported using Datastream 5.0 from Thomson Reuters.

  1. Lou Rada
    22 July 2011 at 12:12 am

    How about a graph showing a historical graph of TAPIS CRUDE prices over the same period.

    • markgreenwood
      26 July 2011 at 11:36 am

      TAPIS (Malaysian) crude is another benchmark oil price. It is available on both Bloomberg (from Jan 1991) and Datastream (from Dec 1986). For example https://bizlib247.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/bbtestgraph.png

      • Rohan
        30 June 2014 at 6:10 am

        Hi there, I’m a student at the University of Otago, New Zealand. I’m trying to acquire data for Tapis crude for my dissertation. I can’t seem to find this information on Datastream – could you help me please?
        Regards

      • markgreenwood
        30 June 2014 at 10:04 am

        Try using Datastream Navigator to search for “Crude Oil Tapis” and double-check that you have the category set to commodities.
        You should be able to find the series with symbol OILTPMY – this has daily data back to December 1986.

  2. 14 November 2013 at 4:53 pm

    Malaysia is not a major oil producer or even a major oil exporter. The 12 OPEC-Crudes used for the OPEC basket price are more important today than Brent (since Brent today is a mix from Brent and at least oil from 4 or 5 other North Sea Oil Fields), I guess same with WTI, West Texas is the area with the largest (onshore) oilfield in the lower 48 and produced most of the oil in World War 2, WTI and Brent are losing more importance and there is a gap since 2010 which has been over 20$ sometimes, that is crazy but due to special US oil situation (strong increased production, low demand, canadian oil which can be only exported in these extreme quantities through the pipelines to Cushing. Canada exports 99% of its growing oil sand production to the US, Mexico exports most oil to the US and imports gasoline from the US.
    [Remainder of this comment has been deleted as it was not relevant to this Business Research Plus post.]

    • markgreenwood
      17 November 2013 at 8:32 am

      Brent and WTI may be losing some of their importance, but they are still the oil prices that are quoted most widely (e.g. in the Financial Times) and therefore the ones most often sought by business and management researchers.

  3. ayyce
    31 March 2014 at 3:57 pm

    Could you say me any database link about historical oil price of OECD countries?

    • markgreenwood
      31 March 2014 at 5:16 pm

      To the best of my knowledge, crude oil is traded globally so there can be prices for oil from different places (Brent (North Sea), WTI (West Texas Intermediate, OPEC, …) and/or different grades (light/medium/heavy) but not on a per-country basis. In addition to the databases mentioned in the post above, Quandl has several oil prices – http://www.quandl.com/markets/commodities/crude-oil-and-gasoline

  1. 5 November 2013 at 12:40 pm
  2. 16 October 2014 at 11:01 am

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