Data Sources & Methodology

Data Provenance & Rights

OilPriceAPI is a data access and packaging service. We collect commodity price information from third-party sources — government agencies (such as the U.S. Energy Information Administration and national energy regulators) and published market reporting — then normalize it and deliver it through a single, reliable API.

What we sell is access, not rights. Our value is the work around the numbers: continuous collection, normalization across sources, historical depth, uptime, and a developer experience that means you never have to build a data pipeline yourself. We sell access, reliability, coverage, format, latency, and cost. We do not sell rights, licenses, ownership, or permission.

What your plan gives you: the ability to call the API and use the responses inside your own organization — applications, dashboards, pricing models, analysis, and internal reporting. That is access to our service. It is not a grant of rights over the underlying price data.
What no plan can give you: permission to redistribute, resell, republish, or publicly display third-party-sourced data. We hold no redistribution or public-display rights in those series, and we cannot convey any. Redistribution and public display are governed by the source, not by your plan — no agreement with us, at any tier, can authorize redistribution of a source that reserves it. If you need those rights, they come from the upstream publisher, not from us. One exception, below: series sourced from government agencies are public domain.
What we are not: OilPriceAPI is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a licensed distributor of any exchange or price-reporting agency. Our data is provided for informational purposes. It is not suitable for use as a settlement price, contract benchmark, or official record — for those purposes, use the official source directly.

Our Value Proposition

We solve the hard problems of energy price data:

✅ 24/7 reliability: Continuous collection with automatic failover
✅ Format normalization: Many different formats converted into one consistent API
✅ Quality validation: Cross-checks across multiple sources to detect anomalies
✅ Historical archival: Years of historical data, stored and served
✅ 99.9% uptime: Professional infrastructure with monitoring and alerts

You could collect this data yourself — but you'd spend weeks building and maintaining what we already run.

Where Our Data Comes From

Government & Regulator Sources (Public Domain)

These series are sourced from government agencies. They are public domain: you may redistribute them and display them publicly, with attribution to the originating agency. That permission flows from the source's public-domain status — not from any license we hold — which is why it is ours to state and yours to rely on.

U.S. EIA — Energy Information Administration (retail diesel and gasoline by state and region, Henry Hub natural gas, jet fuel, and more)
National energy regulators — including Natural Resources Canada, Brazil's ANP, Japan's METI, and other national agencies for country-level fuel prices
Eurostat — European energy statistics

Government-sourced series are identified in the documentation for each endpoint.

Published Market Reporting

The remainder of our catalog is collected from third-party sources that are publicly available — published market reporting, public web pages, and public APIs — then aggregated and cross-validated.

We hold no redistribution or public-display rights in these series, and we cannot convey any. Your plan lets you call the API and use the responses inside your own organization. It does not permit you to redistribute, resell, republish, or publicly display them — and no plan tier changes that, because those rights are governed by the source, not by us.

Being free to read is not the same as being free to redistribute. If you need redistribution or display rights over one of these series, the only party who can grant them is the upstream publisher.

Data Collection Methodology

Automated Collection

Frequency: Every 5–15 minutes during market hours
Retry logic: Exponential backoff on failures, with automatic failover between sources

Multi-Source Validation

When available, we cross-check prices across multiple sources:

Fetch price from Source A
Fetch price from Source B
Fetch price from Source C
Compare: Flag if variance >5%
Manual review for flagged data

Quality Assurance

Outlier detection: Statistical analysis flags anomalies
Timestamp validation: Ensure data freshness
Format verification: Check for parsing errors
Manual review: Human verification of suspicious data

Data Processing Pipeline

Public Sources
    ↓
Collectors
    ↓
Raw Data Lake (PostgreSQL)
    ↓
Normalization Layer
    ↓
Validation Engine
    ↓
Clean Data Store
    ↓
API Layer
    ↓
Your Application

Normalization Steps

Currency conversion: All prices standardized to USD (unless specified)
Unit conversion: Barrels, therms, MWh normalized
Timezone handling: All timestamps in UTC
Field mapping: Consistent field names across sources

Historical Data Archive

Storage

Retention: All historical data since 2020
Frequency: Daily snapshots
Granularity: Intraday data where available
Format: Time-series optimized storage

Backfilling

When adding new commodities, we backfill historical data:

Collect archived public data
Validate against known reference values
Fill gaps with interpolation (marked as estimated)

Legal Basis

Commodity prices are facts, and under U.S. law facts are not copyrightable (Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone, 1991). What OilPriceAPI provides is not ownership of any number, but the service around it: collection, normalization, validation, history, and delivery.

That doctrine covers the bare fact, and it does not settle everything. A publication, index, or compilation built on those facts may carry rights of its own, held by whoever published it. Where it does, those rights are theirs — not ours, and not ours to pass on.

Correspondingly, we convey no ownership of, and no license over, the data. Your subscription is a subscription to our service, on the terms described in our Terms of Service. It is not a license to the underlying price data, and it cannot authorize you to redistribute or publicly display a third-party source that reserves those rights. No plan tier can.

Government-sourced series are the exception: they are public-domain data, so you may redistribute and publicly display them, with attribution to the originating agency. That permission comes from the source, not from us.

Compliance Standards

GDPR / CCPA: No personal data is collected or stored in our price datasets
Informational use: Our data is not a settlement price, contract benchmark, or official record

Data Accuracy & Reliability

Error Rates

Target accuracy: 99.9% for latest prices
Validation coverage: 85%+ cross-checked
Correction SLA: 24 hours for reported errors

Known Limitations

⚠️ Delayed data: Some sources update with a delay; every response carries a timestamp so you can evaluate freshness
⚠️ Source failures: Temporary outages affect availability
⚠️ Market closures: No data during non-trading hours for some commodities
⚠️ Historical gaps: Some commodities have incomplete historical data