The oil information cartel is (finally) broken

Your first inclination may be to disagree with me. You know that you can tap into the current (or historic) price of West Texas Intermediate or Brent crude any time you want.

What you are missing is that those are just two oil benchmarks out of hundreds - thousands likely.
Generally people believe that oil is a single completely indistinguishable, homogenous substance. A barrel of oil is a barrel of oil is a barrel of oil.

That is not the case.

In its natural unrefined state crude oil differs in consistency and density from very thin, volatile and light oil to very thick, almost solid heavy oil. It also differs in color with all kinds of shades from pitch black to a light golden yellow.

Each place where oil is found has very unique properties when it comes to volatility, viscosity and toxicity.

In Canada alone there are north of seventy different oil blends. You read that correctly….I said seventy!

Knowing the exact blend is essential for the refinery process which has to account for the exact chemical and viscosity of the oil being processed.

Stafford knew that if couldn't find pricing for a major type of crude like Bonny light that there were countless others that would be even hard to get.

His quest quickly led him to a discovery. The only place to obtain a fairly complete set of current oil price data required a subscription-of $30,000 to $50,000 per year.

These sources knew they had the upper hand over people who had to have that data, and they exploited it.

Even that expensive cost the oil price info wasn't complete. It involved receiving only an end of day price for the various source of crudes – nothing real time.

This just motivated Stafford more. His focus now was on finding a way to open up the world of oil prices, to make the information available to everyone.