ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the economic features and forecasting techniques of crude oil (CO) and petroleum derivatives for process systems engineering (PSE)/computer-aided process engineering (CAPE) applications. CO plays a key role in most industrial and financial markets as it is the reference component of both chemical and oil and gas sectors. The chapter offers an extended introduction to CO and specifically on its fundamentals, historical trends and political events that influenced the dynamics of its quotations, and economic, strategic, and political players of international markets. It reports the most significant econometric, economic, and hybrid models of the scientific literature, which are able to forecast the evolution of CO quotations over different time horizons. These price models can be used in PSE/CAPE applications to simulate a probabilistic distribution of future scenarios for the economic assessment of industrial activities.
