Primary audience
Crude marketers, producers, revenue accountants, royalty platforms, pricing analysts, and schedulers who reconcile purchaser postings across companies and dates.
Energy data research
Experiment 1 · crude pricing records
Crude purchaser posted prices: a collection feasibility experiment
Can public purchaser bulletins become a reliable, versioned history of crude grades, locations, effective dates, and corrections? This experiment starts with source preservation—not a product claim.
Status
collection probe
Initial scope
Plains Marketing, Phillips 66, and Energy Transfer official posting surfaces
Collection cadence
Daily source checks; immutable capture whenever content changes
Last reviewed
2026-08-11
This is not yet an available production dataset or OilPriceAPI endpoint. The page documents a collection probe and its decision rules.
Decision context
What this experiment must decide
Decision question
Can OilPriceAPI collect enough direct purchaser postings, with sufficient continuity and rights clarity, to justify a normalized historical API?
Why collect now
Search demand for exact purchaser-posting terms is sparse, so the next decision cannot be made from traffic estimates. Direct-source availability, correction behavior, and buyer workflow evidence matter more.
P · Problem
Problem
Purchaser postings are not the same as WTI spot prices or futures settlements. They are company-issued buying schedules that can vary by crude grade, geography, gravity, effective date, and commercial terms. A generic benchmark feed does not replace the work of locating and reconciling those bulletins.
The sources are fragmented. Some operators publish individual PDF bulletins, some expose monthly summaries, and some use portal-style archives. A posting may be replaced or corrected without preserving a machine-readable prior version. That makes historical reconstruction, audit support, and cross-purchaser comparison expensive.
The SEO screen found only ten estimated monthly searches across the exact-intent seed set. Millions of searches belonged to generic phrases such as “oil price,” which are not evidence that someone wants purchaser postings. This experiment therefore treats collection feasibility and paid workflow evidence as the decision inputs.
A · Approach
Approach
The collection design is intentionally narrower than a production data platform. It preserves evidence, makes uncertainty explicit, and produces a measurable build/no-build decision.
- 1
Inventory direct publishers
Record the official purchaser page, archive structure, document format, update cadence, terms, and earliest visible history. Adjacent benchmark vendors do not count as direct-source coverage.
- 2
Preserve raw evidence
Save the response body, headers, retrieval time, canonical URL, and SHA-256 hash before attempting to extract a price. Never overwrite an earlier capture.
- 3
Detect changes before parsing
Compare hashes and archive listings daily. Separate a new bulletin from a correction, archive redesign, redirect, access failure, or unchanged source.
- 4
Normalize a narrow schema
Extract purchaser, grade, location, posted price, effective time, publication time, bulletin identifier, supersession relationship, and source evidence only when the document states them.
- 5
Audit rights and recovery
Document public access separately from redistribution permission. Record how the collector reports stale, missing, ambiguous, or corrected documents instead of silently carrying forward a value.
- 6
Validate the workflow
Ask design partners to compare the normalized sample with the spreadsheet, bulletin inbox, or reconciliation process they use today. Measure discrepancies and time saved.
R · Research
Research
These are current findings and their decision implications. They are not promises about future OilPriceAPI coverage.
| Issue | Observed finding | Decision implication |
|---|---|---|
| Official coverage exists, but formats differ | Plains exposes dated price bulletins, Phillips 66 describes downloadable Adobe PDF bulletins, and Energy Transfer provides a dedicated crude-oil posted-prices surface. | A three-source probe is possible now, but successful access does not establish consistent fields or comprehensive market coverage. |
| Effective dates are part of the data | Published bulletin examples distinguish bulletin identifiers and effective dates rather than presenting one timeless company price. | A useful model must preserve both publication and effective time and must not infer missing effective dates from retrieval time. |
| Gravity and grade terms complicate comparison | Bulletins may include multiple grades, locations, and gravity adjustments, sometimes with terms on subsequent pages. | The first parser should retain the complete document and provenance; a single extracted WTI number is not an adequate product. |
| Generic search volume is misleading | The live keyword run found ten estimated monthly searches for exact posted-price seeds versus millions for broad oil-price phrases. | Organic discovery may assist distribution, but paid buyer validation must determine whether the data deserves continued investment. |
| Historical continuity is unproven | Visible archives demonstrate that history exists for some publishers, but the current screen did not establish identical retention or correction policies across purchasers. | Collection must continue long enough to observe additions, replacements, and gaps before making an archive-depth claim. |
M · Measurement
Measurement
Primary decision metric
Auditable purchaser coverage: sources with repeatable capture, parsable effective prices, retained provenance, and documented rights status divided by sources required by design partners.
Capture success
Successful scheduled responses divided by scheduled attempts.
Meaningful change rate
New or corrected bulletins per source per collection period.
Field completeness
Records containing purchaser, grade, location, price, effective date, and source evidence.
Parser exception rate
Documents requiring manual review divided by changed documents.
Correction visibility
Replacements or corrections detected with a prior version retained.
Historical depth
Earliest continuously obtainable effective date by purchaser.
Buyer reconciliation accuracy
Agreement with a design partner’s source records, with variance reasons documented.
Collection cost
Engineering and review time per supported purchaser per month.
Continue when
- ✓At least ten buyer-priority purchasers are publicly accessible or contractually obtainable.
- ✓At least 95% of audited fields match source documents, with every exception traceable.
- ✓At least three design partners confirm a recurring reconciliation or historical lookup workflow and one accepts a paid pilot or LOI.
Stop or redesign when
- ×Buyer-priority sources cannot be collected or licensed at economics compatible with the expected contract value.
- ×Prospects need only current benchmark prices and will not pay for purchaser normalization, effective-date history, or provenance.
Initial collection
Started
2026-08-11T21:35:40Z
Current status
All three official publisher surfaces returned HTTP 200 in the first bounded capture.
Baseline observations
- •Plains Marketing exposes a dated bulletin archive with individual documents.
- •Phillips 66 states that crude price bulletins are downloadable PDF documents.
- •Energy Transfer exposes a dedicated crude-oil posted-prices page inside its customer information area.
- •The source census is not yet market-complete and does not include a verified rights determination.
Next capture
Expand the census to ten purchaser-priority sources, then compare daily hashes and archive membership for fourteen days.
Proposed record schema
The schema is a test contract, not a public endpoint specification. Unknown values remain unknown, and every derived field must retain source evidence.
- purchaser
- The company issuing the bulletin.
- bulletin_id
- Publisher identifier, preserved as printed.
- crude_grade
- The source’s grade name; aliases remain separate.
- location
- Basin, field, state, or delivery location stated by the source.
- posted_price
- Numeric value and currency/unit exactly as reported.
- effective_at
- When the posting applies, distinct from retrieval time.
- supersedes
- Prior bulletin or version replaced, only when evidenced.
- source_hash
- Hash of the immutable raw artifact used for audit.
Sources and scope
OilPriceAPI Research prepared this page to test a product decision. The method combines direct-source review, immutable collection probes, and explicit decision gates. External links establish what each source publishes; they do not grant OilPriceAPI redistribution rights or prove complete coverage.
Plains Marketing crude oil price bulletins
Plains All American Pipeline
Supports: Direct publisher archive with dated Plains Marketing bulletins.
Limitation: A visible archive does not establish redistribution rights or complete historical continuity.
Phillips 66 crude oil
Phillips 66
Supports: Official description and access path for Phillips 66 and Union 76 pricing bulletins.
Limitation: Portal and PDF behavior must be tested over repeated captures.
Energy Transfer crude oil posted prices
Energy Transfer
Supports: Official posted-price surface and customer-information context.
Limitation: The page may lead to reports or portal assets with separate access behavior and terms.
Help validate the next decision
If this dataset is part of your workflow, tell us which sources matter, what failure looks like, and what evidence would make the data useful enough to buy. A conversation is evidence; a page view is not.