Oil & Gas Markets

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.

Oil & Gas Industry Operations and Markets

The gentler on-ramp if EBF 301 is too dense. Videos without assignments run about three hours.

Free to audit; certificate is paid.

Introduction to Crude Oil

About 75 minutes on contract specifications and how a hedge is put on.

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

FSC 432: Petroleum Refining

Twelve lessons: crude assay, separation, thermal and catalytic conversion, finishing, refinery economics, plus a full lesson on natural gas processing.

Readable without login. Verified lesson list.

Cours des Mines ParisTech — Energy, Climate and the Economy (8 lectures)

The physical coupling between energy supply and GDP, taught as actual graduate coursework. The best available answer to 'why doesn't the economy just decouple from energy'.

French with English subtitles and dubbed versions. Jancovici founded The Shift Project and Carbone 4.

A Practitioner's Guide to Trade and Commodity Finance

Fills the trade finance gap, with specialist chapter contributions covering documentary credits, standby guarantees, warehouse financing, ECA financing, receivables finance, supply chain finance, Islamic trade finance, and fintech applications. This is the 2nd edition, published in 2021 and is approximately 444 pages. The 2nd edition adds post-pandemic impacts, the Greensill Capital collapse, and Basel III reform effects.

Oil 101

The single best bridge between the subsurface and the barrel: chemistry, geology, drilling, refining, specifications, logistics, pricing.

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.

Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air

Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air - A book resource

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

The history of the oil industry and the pattern-library that makes chokepoint and cartel news legible rather than episodic.

Virtual Barrels: Quantitative Trading in the Oil Market

Treats the futures curve as a hedging-pressure equilibrium rather than a forecast. Written by the former president of Koch Global Partners.

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

US edition of the above.

The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich

Biography of Marc Rich, founder of Glencore and inventor of many of the structures these firms still use.

Metal Men: How Marc Rich Defrauded the Country, Evaded the Law, and Became the World's Most Sought-After Corporate Criminal

The critical counterpoint to the Ammann biography, on the same story and period.

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.

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

Violent price swings are oil's natural state; the calm periods were engineered. A practitioner's history — McNally was a White House energy adviser.

Black Gold and Blackmail: Oil and Great Power Politics

What great powers do in advance when they fear their oil can be cut off, and why they usually over-insure.

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.

The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War

How consistently sanctions produce the adaptation they were meant to prevent. Directly relevant to Russian barrels finding buyers in the east.

Petroleum Refining: Technology, Economics, and Markets

The reference. Unusually the first half is the business half: yields, margins, product pricing and complexity metrics. Where run cuts and crack spreads are grounded.

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

LNG: Fuel for a Changing World — A Nontechnical Guide

Liquefaction, shipping, regasification, plus long-term contracts, destination clauses and pricing formulas.

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.

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

Why shipping is a chronically overbuilt, thin-margin, boom-bust industry rather than a stable toll business.

Maritime Economics

How shipping markets clear: freight rate formation, voyage costs, and cycles reconstructed back to 1741. Why a Gulf-China rate can quadruple.

~800pp. Nothing on the post-2022 sanctions and shadow-fleet era.

The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations

Why petroleum revenue makes states less accountable, less inclined to tax, and more durable when authoritarian. Empirical rather than polemical.

Free short version: 'What Have We Learned about the Resource Curse?' (Annual Review of Political Science, 2015).

Energy Kingdoms: Oil and Political Survival in the Persian Gulf

Subsidised energy as part of the ruling bargain, and why runaway domestic consumption eats the export barrel.

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

How an Oil Refinery Works

Crude classification, distillation, cracking, reforming and hydrotreating anchored to a real plant, ending on the Nelson Complexity Index. One sitting.

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

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.

JKempEnergy

Daily analysis of inventories, positioning, the curve and refinery runs, by Reuters' senior energy analyst 2008-2024.

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.

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

The clearest published walk-through of a physical trade, from origination through freight and hedging to the financing underneath.

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

Volumes through every major chokepoint. The baseline against which any disruption claim should be checked.

Strait of Hormuz

The better single-chokepoint companion to the EIA overview.

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.

Gas Research Programme

The best independent analysis of European gas and LNG.

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

The Nordic Marine Insurance Plan of 2013, Version 2023

Chapter 15 covers war risks: perils insured and excluded, conditional trading areas, notification duties, automatic termination. You read the actual wording with the drafters explaining it clause by clause.

Nordic, not the London market. The English-market equivalent (Institute War and Strikes Clauses) is not free — this is the workaround.

Commodity Markets Outlook and the Pink Sheet

The special-focus chapters are the best short treatment of the gas-ammonia-urea-food chain. The Pink Sheet gives seventy-plus price series in a spreadsheet, updated monthly.

The price forecasts are conservative by construction.

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.

Decarbonization — the annual presentation

A several-hundred-slide annual chartbook on where transition capital, deployment and demand actually stand, by BloombergNEF's former chief content officer.

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.

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

How traders fund themselves on short-term bank debt and why the 2022 margin spiral was briefly a solvency question.

The Economics of Commodity Trading Firms

Why commodity trading firms exist and what economic value they create. Pirrong interviewed traders, operational staff and senior management at Trafigura.

Historical Oil Shocks

Every significant disruption from 1862 to 2008, each with the quantity lost, the price response, and the recession that did or did not follow.

The Macroeconomic Effects of Oil Price Shocks: Why are the 2000s So Different from the 1970s?

Decomposes the decline in oil's macro impact into four channels. Unlike the popular version of the argument, it tells you which channel does the work.

Predates shale, so the net-exporter offset is not in it.

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

Thirty-six pages of forensic detail on the minus $37.63 settlement. The definitive account of the mismatch between financial contracts and physical reality.

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

Understanding the Plunge in Oil Prices: Sources and Implications

The cleanest contemporaneous statement of the market-share logic behind Saudi behaviour in 2014.

World LNG Report 2026

The industry's annual census: volumes traded, liquefaction and regasification capacity, FIDs, fleet, FLNG.

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

Guide to Market Benchmarks

How the tanker indices are constructed: route definitions, benchmark vessel specifications, timecharter-equivalent calculation.

Methodology document — the rate data itself is subscription.

Tracking SDG7: The Energy Progress Report 2026

The official stock-take on electricity and clean cooking access.

Measurement rather than analysis, but it is the number everyone else cites.

Underpriced and Overused: Fossil Fuel Subsidies Data 2025 Update

Explicit and implicit fossil fuel subsidies with the country-level dataset.

Read the definitions before quoting the headline — 'implicit' prices in unpriced externalities, which is a modelling choice, not an accounting fact.

What Have We Learned about the Resource Curse?

The free short version of the argument in The Oil Curse.

World Energy Outlook 2025

The document everyone else argues with, and the source of the STEPS and Current Policies numbers in this article.

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.

Global EV Outlook 2026

Where the road-fuel displacement numbers in this article come from.

Strong on the vehicle side, thin on what displacement does to refinery product yields.

Public policies against global warming: a supply side approach

The origin of the green paradox and the formal basis of the terminal-horizon and 'run on the bank' logic used in Part 4.

Book-length treatment is 'The Green Paradox' (MIT Press, 2012).

Global Warming and the Green Paradox: A Review of Adverse Effects of Climate Policies

Separates the weak from the strong green paradox and shows when extraction costs, reserve heterogeneity and a well-designed carbon tax make it disappear.

Journal version (Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2015) is paywalled; this Oxford copy is free.