Brent tops $101 and record 2026 crack spreads push wholesale fuel costs higher
Refining margins hit record highs in 2026, and that lands on jobbers before it lands anywhere else. Brent traded above $101 this week, up from around $60 before the war, and the crack spread between crude and finished product has stayed wide all year. For a marketer buying at the rack, a wide crack works against you twice. You pay the crude move, then you pay the refiner's margin stacked on top of it.
Work through the mechanics. A 3:2:1 crack is the margin a refiner makes turning three barrels of crude into two of gasoline and one of distillate. When that spread is at record levels, refiners are capturing more per barrel, and the rack reflects it. The result is higher wholesale cost on days when crude barely moves. If you were counting on a flat crude tape to hold your buy price steady, the crack has been quietly eating that.
Why $100 is holding
OilPrice reports Brent has stayed above $100 for most of the past month even though tanker-tracking services now show crude flows out of the Strait of Hormuz back at, and past, pre-war levels. Supply returning did not pull the price down. A storm and fresh Houthi attacks on shipping are keeping a risk premium baked into the benchmark. For a jobber, that means your crude floor could sit near $100 even while physical barrels move freely, so do not plan your Q4 rack assumptions around a quick slide back toward $80.
Biodiesel blendstock
The US glycerine market entered October firm, pushed by strong biofuel activity and tight soybean supply. Glycerine is the co-product of biodiesel, so its strength is a read on how hard biodiesel plants are running. US biofuel producers consumed the highest monthly volume of soybean oil in the available series in July. Tight soybean oil plus heavy biodiesel runs could keep blendstock firm into the winter. Anyone pulling B5 to B20 off the rack may see that feedstock cost hold rather than ease, which matters most where state mandates or blender economics force the gallons.
What to watch
Whether the Hormuz risk premium comes out of Brent if the storm clears and the shipping attacks stop, or whether traders keep paying up for the uncertainty. Whether crack spreads hold their 2026 highs through the fourth quarter, since that spread is doing more to your rack price right now than the crude headline is. And soybean oil supply, which sets the floor under biodiesel blendstock for marketers who have to blend regardless of where the economics sit.