There is little doubt that Iraq’s mooted shift to using Dubai crude futures from long-standing price assessor Platts will shake up the trading of Middle East oil, but is it a once-off shock or the first of the dominoes to fall. Iraq’s state oil marketer SOMO has asked its customers for feedback on a planned move to use Oman futures traded on the Dubai Mercantile Exchange (DME) instead of the average of Platts’ Oman-Dubai quotes in pricing its main Basra grade. [nL4N1L71IB] While this may seem an esoteric issue to those outside the cosy world of physical oil trading, it represents a potential seismic shift in the way that more than 12 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude is bought and sold in the Middle East, which is still the world’s […]