We use textual analysis to construct a new measure of global oil price uncertainty (OPU) that captures news-related events related to the oil market. We estimate the aggregate effects of shocks to OPU using both empirical and theoretical methods. OPU negatively affects global measures of economic activity, and country-specific industrial production in the U.S, Canada, France, Japan, and Spain. These effects are evaluated in a New-Keynesian model that includes oil in the firm’s production function. A third-order approximation to the model illustrates impulse responses that are qualitatively consistent with the empirical evidence, validating our text-based measure of oil price uncertainty.