When looking at the history of crude oil prices in the United States over the last 50 years, both the highest oil price and the lowest have been marked relatively recently. Rising inflation, scarcity concerns, and once-in-a-generation global events like the COVID-19 pandemic have all played a role.
For these benchmarks, we’ll look at the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) index, the standard U.S. oil benchmark.
Here are the absolute record highs and lows since 1976:
The All-Time Highest Oil Price: July 2008
- Nominal Price: $147.27 per barrel
- Inflation-Adjusted Price: Equivalent to over $214 per barrel today.
What happened: Driven by a “commodity super-cycle,” exploding energy demand from rapidly developing economies (especially China), and fears that the world was running out of easily accessible oil, prices skyrocketed. This record peak was short-lived, however. Just a few months later, the 2008 global financial crisis hit, causing the price to crash back down to around $32 by December of that same year.
The All-Time Lowest Oil Price: April 2020
- Nominal Price: -$37.63 per barrel (Intraday dropped to -$40.32)
What happened: Yes, that is a negative number. During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, global travel ground to a sudden, complete halt. Oil production didn’t stop fast enough, creating a massive global supply glut. On April 20, 2020, the storage facilities in Cushing, Oklahoma (the main delivery point for U.S. oil), completely ran out of space.
Because oil keeps pumping and traders had nowhere to physically put it, sellers were actually forcing people to take the oil off their hands—meaning traders paid buyers up to $40 a barrel just to take the oil away.
Note on “Normal” Lows: If you exclude that bizarre, single-day technical anomaly from the pandemic, the lowest positive price of oil in modern history occurred in December 1998, when a combination of the Asian Financial Crisis and oversupply caused oil to bottom out at $10.72 per barrel (roughly $20–$23 when adjusted for inflation).
