Oil prices hit two-year highs on Monday following bullish news coming from OPEC and the Middle East, further stressing the tremendous impact of geopolitical risk on oil markets. – The Brent-WTI spread recently widened to its largest point in more than two years. In the past, that has meant that U.S. East Coast refineries purchased a lot more domestic crude, shipping it by rail even though that tends to be a costly form of transit. – In fact, in the years when crude-by-rail transit were at its peak, it coincided with a time when WTI traded at a sharp discount to Brent, reaching a high of $27 per barrel. – But the narrowing of the Brent-WTI spread since 2015, when the U.S. crude oil export ban was lifted, led to a sharp decline in the amount of […]