WTI Crude

West Texas Intermediate is light sweet crude, roughly 40 degrees API with about 0.24% sulphur, deliverable by pipeline into Cushing, Oklahoma. The NYMEX Light Sweet Crude Oil futures contract, ticker CL, launched in March 1983 and grew into the most liquid commodity futures contract in the world, routinely trading more than a million contracts a day. The contract is physically delivered: a trader holding a long position through expiry takes delivery of 1,000 barrels in Cushing tankage. That physical anchor keeps the paper price honest, and on April 20, 2020 it enforced honesty brutally, when the expiring May contract settled at negative $37.63 per barrel because COVID-era demand destruction had left Cushing with almost no uncommitted storage.

The shale revolution rebuilt WTI's global standing. US crude production roughly tripled from its 2008 low to about 13.5 million barrels per day in 2025, the largest of any country in history. Congress lifted the 40-year-old crude export ban in December 2015, and the US now exports roughly 4 million barrels per day, most of it Permian-sourced WTI Midland loading on the Gulf Coast. The landlocked benchmark of the 2000s, which once traded at deep discounts to Brent when Cushing pipelines pointed the wrong way, became a waterborne global grade. In June 2023, WTI Midland was admitted into the dated Brent basket itself, so American barrels now help set the price of the rival benchmark.

WTI is the natural hedging instrument for the entire Western Hemisphere barrel: US producers, Gulf Coast refiners, Canadian and Latin American grades that trade as differentials to it, and the managed-money flows that use CL as the macro oil expression. Oil 101 covers WTI contract mechanics, the Cushing delivery system, and the Brent-WTI arbitrage in depth.