Best resources to learnOil & Gas Markets

How an Oil Refinery Works

A working tour of refinery process units, tracing crude classification, atmospheric distillation, catalytic cracking, reforming and hydrotreating through a real plant, and closing on the Nelson Complexity Index that ranks how much upgrading a refinery can do.

541 points / 192 comments on Hacker News — the strongest community signal in the search.

Oil 101

A reference covering the full chain from reservoir geology and drilling through refining chemistry, product specifications, transport and the mechanics of benchmark pricing, giving readers the physical vocabulary behind terms traders and analysts use daily.

ISBN is for the 2009 1st edition hardback. The 2nd edition (2026) is FREE and web-only at the URL given, with NO ISBN assigned. Link the free 2nd edition; keep the ISBN for catalogue matching only.

Oil & Gas Industry Operations and Markets

A Duke University survey of the upstream, midstream and downstream segments, how oil and gas are priced and traded, and the policy and environmental constraints on the sector. Roughly three hours of video without assignments.

Free to audit; certificate is paid.

Physical Oil Trading Basics (Parts 1 and 2)

A former trading-house risk manager walks a cargo through the five things that define a trade: the publication that prices it, the window, the Incoterm, the spec, the formula.

Author is pseudonymous — flag if your database requires attributable authorship. Stress-tested in ~70 comments by other traders.

Introduction to Crude Oil

Roughly 75 minutes of short lessons on the crude oil futures market, covering contract specifications and a worked example of placing a hedge. After it you can read a futures quote and follow how producers manage price risk.

An exchange explaining its own products — read the framing accordingly.

Commodities Demystified: A Guide to Trading and the Global Supply Chain

A trading house's own walk-through of the physical commodity supply chain: sourcing, storage, blending, freight, price risk management and the bank financing that underwrites each cargo. Free, and the clearest published account of how a physical trade works.

2nd edition is current — no 3rd exists despite frequent online references. A trading house describing itself, so the risk and conduct sections are the sanitised version.

World Oil Transit Chokepoints

EIA's data page on the Strait of Hormuz, Malacca, Bab el-Mandeb, Suez and the other maritime passages, giving the daily crude and product volumes moving through each and the alternative routes available if one closes.

Strait of Hormuz

IEA briefing on the chokepoint that carries roughly a fifth of global oil supply, covering the volumes that transit it, the limited bypass pipeline capacity, and how IEA emergency stocks would answer a disruption.

Scenarios in the World Energy Outlook 2025

What CPS, STEPS and NZE each assume, by the people who build them. If you do not know which scenario a headline came from, the headline is meaningless.

Read this BEFORE quoting any IEA number.

Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air

Puts energy consumption and every supply option into one common unit, kilowatt-hours per person per day, then adds up whether renewables can cover demand. Teaches you to reason about energy claims numerically rather than rhetorically.

EBF 301: Global Finance for the Earth, Energy, and Materials Industries

Twelve lessons on contract specs, cash-market pricing methodology, the price reporting agencies, logistics, hedging, swaps and spreads. The only free source that teaches PRA methodology properly.

Full text readable without login. Co-authored by a former physical energy trader.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

A narrative history of the petroleum industry from the first Pennsylvania wells through the Gulf War, covering Standard Oil, the concession era, OPEC and the supply shocks, so cartel and chokepoint headlines read as recurring patterns.

JKempEnergy

Regular data-driven notes on crude and product inventories, fund positioning, the shape of the futures curve, refinery runs and gas storage, written by the analyst who covered energy markets as a Reuters columnist for over fifteen years.

ACCESS UNSTABLE: has moved between free, paid and freemium since he left Reuters. Free tier confirmed live 10 Aug 2026. Re-check before publishing.

Monthly Oil Market Report

The only monthly balance published by the producers themselves. Read alongside the IEA rather than instead of it — the divergence is the informative object.

Free, no registration.

The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources

Two Bloomberg journalists trace how commodity trading houses like Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura moved oil, metals and grain through embargoes, coups and collapses. Explains why physical traders, not producers, often set the terms of resource markets.

The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

A biography of Marc Rich, built on interviews with him, tracing the invention of the spot crude market, trading with embargoed regimes, the tax indictment and flight to Switzerland, and the firm that became Glencore.

Energy Trading & Investing: Trading, Risk Management, and Structuring Deals in the Energy Markets

Crude, products, gas, LNG, power and emissions with structuring and risk management on top. Worth it only if you need the sectors Oil 101 stops short of.

Inside the commodity markets in 2020-23 — what happened and how they work

A paper prepared for the ECB's Sintra forum explaining how commodity traders finance themselves with short-term bank credit, and why the margin calls of 2022 turned a liquidity problem into a question about the solvency of major houses.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices

A history arguing that wild price swings are oil's default condition, and that the stable decades were produced by deliberate control, first by the Texas Railroad Commission and later by OPEC. Written by a former White House energy adviser.

Understanding the Plunge in Oil Prices: Sources and Implications

A World Bank chapter separating the supply and demand causes of the 2014 price collapse, quantifying each, and setting out the consequences for oil exporters, importers and OPEC's decision not to cut output.

FSC 432: Petroleum Refining

Penn State online course in twelve lessons covering crude oil assay, distillation and separation, thermal and catalytic conversion processes, product finishing, refinery economics and natural gas processing. Learners understand how a refinery turns crude into fuels and how units fit together.

Readable without login. Verified lesson list.

LNG: Fuel for a Changing World — A Nontechnical Guide

A nontechnical account of the LNG chain from gas field through liquefaction, shipping and regasification, then the commercial layer: long-term sale and purchase agreements, destination clauses, oil-indexed pricing formulas and the shift toward hub-linked terms.

620pp, hardcover only. Predates the 2022 European repricing — use for the plumbing, not the market picture. 'LNG: After the Pandemic' (2021) is a companion volume, NOT a new edition.

World LNG Report 2026

The International Gas Union's annual statistical review of the LNG trade, reporting volumes shipped by exporter and importer, liquefaction and regasification capacity, final investment decisions, the carrier fleet, and floating LNG projects.

Produced by the industry's own association — read the demand outlook accordingly.

AGSI — Aggregated Gas Storage Inventory

Daily European gas storage by country and operator, with injection and withdrawal rates and an API. The primary source behind every 'EU storage is at X%' headline.

It is data, not explanation.

Energy Kingdoms: Oil and Political Survival in the Persian Gulf

Krane examines how the Gulf monarchies used cheap domestic fuel and electricity as part of the ruling bargain, why consumption then grew fast enough to threaten export revenue, and how governments began rolling subsidies back.

Predates this war and most of Vision 2030's delivery record, but the structural logic holds.

Commodity Markets Outlook and the Pink Sheet

The World Bank's twice-yearly commodity report plus the Pink Sheet, a monthly spreadsheet of roughly seventy price series covering energy, metals, fertilisers and food, with special-focus chapters on how gas prices feed fertiliser and food costs.

The price forecasts are conservative by construction.

World Energy Outlook 2025

The IEA's flagship annual projection of energy supply and demand to 2050, presenting scenarios such as Stated Policies and Net Zero, with the underlying assumptions on investment, fuel prices and emissions that other forecasters benchmark against.

Read it as a scenario set, not a forecast. WEO 2025 dropped the Announced Pledges Scenario entirely.

World Oil Outlook 2026

The producers' long-term view: no peak in sight. A house view from an interested party, which is why the gap between it and STEPS is worth studying.

A Practitioner's Guide to Trade and Commodity Finance

A practitioner reference on trade and commodity finance law and structures, with specialist chapters on documentary credits, standby guarantees, warehouse financing, ECA cover, receivables and supply chain finance. The second edition adds the Greensill collapse and fintech applications.

Virtual Barrels: Quantitative Trading in the Oil Market

Quantitative models for oil derivatives, treating the futures curve as an equilibrium between hedging pressure and speculative risk capital rather than a forecast. Covers spreads, options, volatility and systematic strategies, with the mathematics worked out.

ISBN-10 is retail-corroborated, not on Springer's page — null it if your bar is publisher-stated. Hardcover 9783031361500. Assumes comfort with algebra.

The New Forward Brent Benchmark

How Dated Brent is actually assessed, and why WTI Midland was admitted to the basket. If you quote Brent, you should know the benchmark is now partly American.

The Economics of Commodity Trading Firms

An economic analysis of why commodity trading firms exist, framing them as transformers of goods in space, time and form, and examining their risk management, capital structure, and where systemic risk does and does not sit.

Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics

A study of the anticipatory strategies great powers adopt when they fear their oil supply could be severed: stockpiling, self-sufficiency drives, and seizing territory, and why leaders consistently overestimate the threat and over-insure against it.

No paperback exists. Open access via Knowledge Unlatched under the digital ISBN 9781501749216 — that is the number in the article's URL, and it is the ebook, not the print object.

Historical Oil Shocks

Hamilton's survey of oil market disruptions from 1862 through 2008, pairing each episode with the volume of production lost, the price move that followed, and the evidence on whether it contributed to a US recession.

Interim Staff Report: Trading in NYMEX WTI Crude Oil Futures around April 20, 2020

The regulator's forensic reconstruction of the day WTI futures settled at minus $37.63, covering order flow, storage constraints at Cushing, and how expiry mechanics in a physically settled contract produced a negative price.

Deliberately reaches no conclusion on trader conduct; that was left to enforcement.

Petroleum Refining: Technology, Economics, and Markets

Reference text on petroleum refining that pairs process technology with refinery economics: crude properties, product yields, unit operations, margins, product pricing and complexity metrics. Readers learn how refinery configuration drives run decisions, crack spreads and profitability.

722pp, priced as a reference work. Go here only after the free Penn State course.

Gas Research Programme

Ongoing research output from the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies on gas and LNG: pricing mechanisms, contract structures, and regional market analysis. Papers are free and technical, aimed at readers who already follow European gas and global LNG trade.

Written for people who already know the plumbing; start with Tusiani.