Prices paid by US motorists are set by Brent
From the following link,
http://lynk.ly/stories/view/743534
"Prices paid by US motorists are set by Brent, not US light sweet crude futures, commonly known as West Texas Intermediate , WTI. And from an economic perspective, it is Brent prices (still up $19, 20% since the start of the year) rather than US crude futures (down $3, 3.5%) that matter for spending patterns and the health of the economy. Brent's resilience, despite widespread signs of a global slowdown, means US drivers and consumers cannot expect much relief from high fuel costs. has fallen relative to Brent and other seaborne crudes, a similar gap has opened up between WTI and gasoline futures. The growing spread between Brent and WTI has a more or less direct counterpart in a growing spread between the WTI and gasoline contracts. For outsiders, it seems counterintuitive for the cost of gasoline in the United States to be set by a European crude contract rather than a North American one. But that ignores location differences. CME's US crude contract is for light sweet oil delivered at Cushing while its gasoline contract is for blendstock delivered to New York Harbor. While WTI suffers from the now familiar problem of being landlocked with no pipeline connection to international markets, the gasoline contract is seaborne and has more in common with Brent. Gasoline's New York delivery location also means it represents the cost of bringing gasoline to the East Coast from Europe (or keeping gasoline in the United States rather than exporting it to Europe or Latin America), which ties the price of blendstock futures to European and international gasoline prices, and via them to Brent and other seaborne oils. But it is not just blendstock futures that are tracking Brent rather than local crude costs. Wholesale gasoline prices (and via them retail prices) are also linked directly to European rather than Midwest crude costs. Cheap crude around Cushing and the rest of the Midwest is fattening local refiners' margins, rather than cutting the cost of finished products. None of this should come as a surprise, since prices for products are set at the margin, and therefore by the most expensive crude streams processed by US refiners, not the cheapest. Unfortunately, however, there is a still a tendency among analysts to speak about WTI as a US benchmark and Brent as a European one, which the uninitiated have assumed means WTI is relevant for US consumers and the economy, while Brent is relevant in Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. "