In October, the world’s biggest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, announced it was dumping the longtime WTI benchmark. The recent switch confirms expectations that their switch to Arbus would lead other producers, including Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, to do the same.
The WTI is based on a formula tied to the light, sweet crude futures trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex), the main global platform for oil trading. A dominant benchmark, the WTI is based off higher-quality oil delivered to Cushing, Okla and reflects storage and pipline capacity problems at Cushing. Recently, it’s suffered from fluctations attributes to the speculation on crude futures trading on the Nymex.
The Argus index, published by London-based Argus Media launched the ASCI in May this year to track the price of lower-quality oil blends produced in the Gulf of Mexico that are of similar quality to most of the oil imported from the Middle East.
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