Oil was trading at $87.41 a barrel at 7:15 a.m. Eastern Time on Aug. 26, 2026, with Brent used as the benchmark. That put the market $2.80 lower than the prior morning, even though the price was still about $20 above the same time last year.
That is the number readers are chasing today because oil moves quickly, and the change can reach the pump before long. Crude oil makes up more than half the cost of a gallon of gasoline, so when oil rises, gas prices usually follow in short order; when oil falls, the relief tends to come more slowly, in the familiar rockets-and-feathers pattern.
Brent is used because it better reflects global oil performance. Much of the world's traded crude is priced off it, which makes it a cleaner reference than WTI for a market that crosses borders and shipping lanes. The U.S. Energy Information Administration now leans on Brent as its main reference in its Annual Energy Outlook, a sign of how central the benchmark has become.
The price itself is not set in a vacuum. Oil is driven mainly by supply and demand, including news about future supply and future demand, but traders also react fast to shocks that do not fit neatly into a balance sheet. Fears of economic slowdown, conflict, or similar disruptions can move the market sharply, and in the U.S. the outlook can also shift on how friendly an administration is to drilling because that affects future supply.
That is why a single morning quote can carry more weight than it first appears to. In 2025, The Trump administration moved to reopen more than 1.5 million acres in the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas leasing, reversing The Biden administration's limits on drilling there. Those policy choices do not explain every price move, but they are part of the backdrop traders watch when they decide where oil should trade next.
There is still one thing the market does not answer cleanly: what caused the $2.80 drop from the previous morning. Prices can update constantly when the futures markets are open, so the number is a moving target, not a fixed one. For drivers and industries that rely on gasoline or natural gas, that means the next quote may matter as much as the one in hand now.
The morning's price is the snapshot; the next update is the story that follows.
