Oil Price Drivers - Trilingual Crude Oil Pricing Guide

Oil Price Drivers is a free, trilingual guide to the forces behind crude oil pricing. It covers the economics, the geopolitics, and the financial mechanics. Then it goes further: a dedicated section on how oil prices pass through to household purchasing power in remittance-dependent economies like Tajikistan.

The six forces

The main page walks through six editorial sections:

1. Supply & Demand - the baseline for every price movement
2. OPEC+ & Cartel Politics - how roughly 40% of global supply is coordinated by one alliance
3. Oil Benchmarks & Grades - why Brent, WTI, Dubai, and Urals trade at different prices
4. Geopolitics & Risk Premiums - chokepoints, sanctions, and the events that spike prices overnight
5. Financial Markets & the Dollar - futures trading, speculative positioning, and the Fed's influence
6. The Energy Transition - structural forces reshaping demand over the next decade

Each section is written in plain language with sourced statistics. IEA data on peak fuel demand (2027), EV displacement (5.4 mb/d), and petrochemicals growth (18.4 mb/d by 2030) are cited where relevant.

Development economics

The Mechanics page is where this guide diverges from standard oil price explainers. Five sections apply a development economics lens to Tajikistan's specific exposure:

Resource Curse in Non-Producers. Tajikistan doesn't produce oil, but it still suffers from commodity dependence through remittances. A six-step cascade model shows how this works, with concept cards for Auty's resource curse, Dutch Disease, and Rentier State theory.

Price Transmission. Fuel price increases don't stay at the pump. They move through transport costs into food prices. This section maps the chain with specific multipliers.

Remittance Exposure. Remittances account for roughly 49% of Tajikistan's GDP. When oil prices drop, Russia's economy contracts, wages fall for Tajik migrant workers, and less money reaches households in Dushanbe and Khujand. The 2014-2016 period is a case study, sourced from World Bank and IMF data.

Purchasing Power Matrix. An interactive 2x2 quadrant mapping oil prices against RUB/TJS exchange rates. Four historical periods are plotted: high oil with a strong ruble, low oil with a weak ruble, and the diagonal scenarios. Original analysis, not reproduced from another source.

Shock Anatomy. A three-layer deep dive into the Hormuz Strait closure of February 2026, when Brent moved from $71 to over $111 in three weeks. Animated timeline, sourced cascade, two channel drill-downs.

Live chart

A D3.js chart tracks Brent and WTI crude oil prices from January 2020 to the present, with 340 weekly data points. Hand-rolled, not a library wrapper or template.

Features:

• Gradient area fills with smooth monotone interpolation
• Interactive crosshair that snaps to the nearest data point
• Live readout panel showing date, Brent, WTI, spread, and FX rate
• Nine annotated market events (COVID crash, WTI going negative, Russia-Ukraine war, OPEC+ cuts, Hormuz closure)
• RUB/TJS exchange rate overlay from the National Bank of Tajikistan, on by default
• Time range selector (1Y, 3Y, 5Y, ALL) with animated transitions
• Scroll-triggered entry animation
• CSV export for all data series

Weekly updates

The Updates page publishes a short narrative summary each week. Direction verbs and streak detection give context to the numbers. A 12-week history table provides the recent trend, and a paragraph connects the week's price movement to remittance conditions.

Architecture

The entire site is vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No framework, no build toolchain beyond a single Node.js script that generates localized pages. Zero npm dependencies.

• Chart: D3.js v7, loaded from CDN with Subresource Integrity
• Data pipeline: GitHub Actions running Wednesday and Friday at 16:00 UTC, pulling from EIA API and NBT.tj. Self-healing with backfill up to 10 weeks and range validation ($10-300 for oil, 0.05-0.50 for FX)
• SEO: Per-language static pages with baked HTML so crawlers see localized content without JavaScript. JSON-LD schemas, hreflang, IndexNow for Bing and Yandex
• Security: A+ on Mozilla HTTP Observatory (100/100). Six headers: HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, Referrer-Policy, Permissions-Policy
• Hosting: Vercel on a custom domain (oilprice.guide)

Nine pages total: three templates (main guide, mechanics, weekly updates) across three languages. About 467 translated strings per language.

Try it

The full guide is at oilprice.guide. Switch between English, Russian, and Tajik using the language toggle at the top.