Murban’s Growing Market Depth Puts It Head-to-Head With WTI in Asia

Back in 2016, Murban crude was introduced into the Dubai basket, along with Al-Shaheen, as a response to a lack of supply and price volatility caused by limited physical crude availability for the benchmark. Murban comes from the Murban oil field in Abu Dhabi–one of the seven emirates that form the United Arab Emirates–and is produced by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). It’s a light sweet crude with a sulphur content of 0.78% and an API gravity of 39.9 degrees.

The move to include it in the basket was intended to deepen the pool of deliverable crude and prevent market manipulation by adding more freely traded grades. The Dubai crude basket is a reference benchmark for Middle Eastern crude oil pricing, used primarily for exports to Asia. It evolved from a single grade to a basket of grades, and now includes Dubai, Oman, Upper Zakum, Al Shaheen, and Murban, to ensure adequate physical supply for the market. Price reporting agencies like S&P Global assess the value of this basket of crudes.

The total production of the five grades that make up the physical Dubai basket benchmark is over 3.5 million barrels per day (b/d), with approximately 2.4 million b/d available for free trade. This volume underpins the physical spot market. The average daily trading volume for the Platts Dubai Crude Oil Futures on the Tokyo Commodity Exchange (TOCOM) was 7,723 contracts in 2023, which represented approximately 2.3 million b/d. However, the Platts Dubai benchmark handles much bigger volumes, serving as the primary pricing reference for nearly 30 million b/d of crude oil exported to Asia.

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Murban crude has taken on a life of its own, becoming one of the most prominent and frequently delivered grades in the Platts Dubai crude oil benchmark basket.

In 2021, Abu Dhabi launched IFAD (ICE Futures Abu Dhabi) futures, its flagship contract for the physically delivered Murban crude oil. Trading in Murban futures really took off in 2024, smashing records quarter after quarter. In the second quarter alone, volumes hit 1.5 billion barrels, more than double the pace seen at the start of the year. June set fresh highs across the board, with an average of 31 million barrels changing hands daily and a single-day peak of 57,300 contracts, or 57.3 million barrels. The surge proved that Murban is no longer a niche Gulf crude–it’s becoming a go-to benchmark with real global traction.

As Abu Dhabi increases Murban availability and IFAD trading volumes build depth, the grade is no longer confined to a regional role. Its pricing relationship with WTI has begun to narrow, pushing the two into more direct competition in Asian refining centers that once defaulted to U.S. barrels when economics allowed.

The result is a subtle but consequential shift: Murban is gaining the liquidity and transparency that make a benchmark useful, just as WTI’s reach into Asia is shaped by freight, arbitrage cycles, and Gulf Coast supply patterns. The Murban and WTI pricing relationship has been narrowing, thanks to rising demand for Middle Eastern crudes, specifically Murban, alongside factors like ADNOC diverting the grade to its domestic refinery and Western sanctions on Russian oil imports, which encourages Asian buyers to seek alternatives. This has made Murban relatively more expensive, prompting Asian refiners to increase their imports of WTI crude as it becomes more economically attractive, closing the gap between the two benchmarks.

The S&P Global Commodity Insights (Platts) has been consulting on changes to how Murban crude is priced in its Dubai benchmark, with the proposed changes scheduled to take effect on January 2, 2026. The key proposal is to assess Murban without a floor price relative to the Dubai benchmark, allowing its price to trade above or below other basket grades based on market supply and demand. Platts also plans to adjust the methodology for calculating Murban’s quality premium against other grades in the Dubai basket, such as Oman, Upper Zakum, and Al Shaheen, to better reflect market dynamics. Currently, an upward quality premium is applied to Murban to reflect its superior quality compared to other grades in the basket. Under the new proposal, Murban would be assessed based on bids, offers, and trades for Murban partials and cargoes, reflecting its value in the physical market.

Middle East Official Selling Price (OSP) formulas are not standardized but vary by country, with common methods including formulas based on exchange-traded futures (like the Dubai/Oman benchmark), hybrid formulas combining futures with other factors, and tender-based or pure Price Reporting Agency (PRA)-based pricing. For example, Saudi Aramco uses a hybrid formula that includes the Dubai/Oman average but also considers other market dynamics like the spread between different Dubai futures contracts. On the other hand,  Qatar relies on tender-based formulas while Iraq uses a pricing mechanism primarily based on the assessments published by independent Price Reporting Agencies (PRAs), namely Platts and Argus Media.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

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