2026-08-11
The war premium
Brent prices oil that travels by sea — the barrels that leave the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz and the Russian ports of the Baltic and the Black Sea. WTI prices oil that sits in Cushing, Oklahoma, a long way inland. When a war threatens tankers and straits, Brent rises more than WTI does, so the gap between the two is a rough measure of what the market charges for war risk.
In quiet years that gap is small and dull. The median from 2021 through 2025 is $3.98 a barrel. The invasion of Ukraine pushed it to $14.37 on July 21, 2022. Then the war with Iran pushed it to $25.94 on April 8, 2026, the widest it has been since 2012. It has narrowed since: the last reading, on August 3, 2026, is $6.94.
The chart below draws both prices and the gap. Hover anywhere for the day’s numbers, use the range buttons to zoom into a war, and switch the spread to a percentage of WTI if you would rather read it that way.
Spot prices, $ per barrel
Numbered events
- 2022-02-24Russia invades Ukraine
- 2022-12-05EU embargo and G7 price cap on Russian seaborne crude
- 2023-10-07Hamas attacks Israel
- 2023-11-19Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping begin
- 2024-04-13Iran strikes Israel directly for the first time
- 2024-10-01Iran fires second missile barrage at Israel
- 2025-06-13Israel–Iran 12-day war; US strikes June 21–22
- 2026-02-28US–Israel war with Iran begins
- 2026-03-09Strait of Hormuz effectively closed
- 2026-04-08Ceasefire announced; biggest one-day oil drop in six years
- 2026-07-08Re-escalation: US strikes on Iran resume
- 2026-07-20Houthis attack Saudi tankers; Brent tops $100
Data table — daily values
| Date | Brent $ | WTI $ | Spread $ | Spread % |
|---|
1,368 trading days, 2021-01-04 to 2026-08-03.
How to read this
Read the distance from the median line, not the level. The spread also carries transport and logistics costs, which have nothing to do with war. It blew past $20 in 2011 to 2014 because shale oil was arriving in Cushing faster than the pipelines could take it out, and no one was shooting at anyone. What marks a war premium is the spread pulling away from its own recent normal, the way it did after the invasion of Ukraine and again in the 2026 war with Iran.
These are spot prices, not futures. During the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, physical cargoes traded well above the futures prices the press was quoting: this series printed $138 for Brent on April 7, 2026, while front-month futures peaked near $126. A war premium lands hardest on barrels you can load today, which is what a spot price measures. The futures market got strange too — WTI briefly traded above Brent on April 1, 2026, as traders repriced US barrels in the middle of the chaos.
The data lags about a week. FRED republishes the EIA’s daily spot prices with a short delay, so the last point here is August 3, 2026.
Sources: FRED series DCOILBRENTEU and DCOILWTICO, the EIA’s daily spot prices, fetched August 11, 2026. Spread = Brent − WTI. The baseline is a 252-trading-day rolling median of the spread.