Crossing the Atlantic: geography, power and the transformation of global oil price formation

How do commodity price benchmarks adapt when their material foundations erode? We answer through the 2023 reconstitution of Brent, the world's most widely used oil price benchmark. The inclusion of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) Midland, delivering US crude into a North Sea benchmark, was debated in the dry register of price-reporting methodology. It was also a profound spatial and institutional transformation. Our approach is ‘genetic’ in Walton Hamilton's sense: it explains a market institution by tracing how it was assembled. Combining network analysis, spatial mapping and counterfactual price reconstruction, we show three things: US Gulf Coast infrastructure was layered onto Brent's North Sea architecture rather than replacing it; geographic expansion did not broaden participation, the same firms prevailing on logistical depth and relational positioning; and the reform reshaped Brent's vulnerability asymmetrically, damping scarcity-driven price spikes while introducing a less stable lower floor shaped by abundant supply and transcontinental logistics. The implication for the political economy of commodity markets is that price formation does not precede distributional struggle: it is the terrain on which that struggle is fought, and the benchmark a central site of that struggle. Geography can shift, the basket of eligible crudes can expand, the nature of the struggle over price formation itself can be transformed, and the same hands can still set the price.