Crack Spreads

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration spot prices via FRED. EIA publishes with a delay of several days, so the latest point can trail the futures market by up to a week.

What a crack spread is

Crude oil is not what people put in their trucks. It has to be refined, and the crack spread is the refiner's gross margin: the price of the fuel minus the price of the crude it came from.

Fuel is quoted per gallon and crude per barrel, so the fuel price is multiplied by 42, the number of gallons in a barrel. The spreads on this page:

The 3-2-1 is the industry's rule of thumb for a typical US refinery: three barrels of crude yield about two barrels of gasoline and one of diesel.

Why it matters for gold

Headlines follow the price of crude. But when the bottleneck is refining capacity rather than oil, crude can fall while diesel and gasoline stay expensive. That is what 2026 has looked like: dark tankers kept Gulf crude moving past a closed Strait of Hormuz, while drone strikes on Russian and Saudi refineries and a Russian fuel-export ban squeezed the products themselves.

Diesel moves freight, farm machinery and industry, so a high diesel crack leaks into the price of almost everything else. Europe runs far more on diesel than the US, which makes this the channel through which an energy shock keeps euro-area inflation sticky, and keeps the ECB under pressure, even on days when Brent falls.

How to read the chart

Gasoline cracks are seasonal. They tend to peak in the summer driving season and drop in September, when refiners switch to cheaper winter-grade gasoline. Diesel cracks usually rise into winter with heating demand. A diesel crack that ignores those seasons, or a gasoline crack that stays high after summer, is a supply story rather than a seasonal one.

Switch on Brent in the legend to compare. The widest gaps between crude and the cracks mark the moments when refining, not oil, was the constraint: 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, and again in 2026.