The spot premium for Dubai crude has slumped by more than half to hit its lowest level in three weeks after more sellers emerged and piled on offers while TotalEnergies remained the sole bidder, according to traders and data collated by Reuters.
The premium for the Middle East benchmark that prices millions of barrels of crude imported by Asia dropped sharply to about $17 a barrel at the market close on Thursday, down more than 60 per cent from $51.20 a barrel against Dubai swaps in the previous session, underscoring severe price volatility due to the US-Israeli war with Iran which has disrupted shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
Sellers such as Unipec, Vitol, Shell and BP started offering Dubai an hour before the trading window opened on Thursday, three of the people said.
"They had more than an hour to keep offering (Dubai) down," one of them said. "Totsa came up but it wasn't even trying to aggressively counter them."
SP Global Platts' Market on Close process - known as the window - runs from 4:00 pm to 4:30 pm Singapore time (08:00-08:30 GMT) on weekdays, during which traders submit bids and offers that feed directly into daily price assessments.
A second trader said the tight timing and price increment rules make it hard for sellers to respond swiftly to an aggressive early bid. Under Platts' methodology, prices can move by a maximum of five cents a barrel every five seconds.
Platts did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Totsa, the trading arm of French major TotalEnergies, has been the sole buyer of Middle East crude during the Platts window since the start of the month, snapping up a total of 69 Oman and Murban crude cargoes so far, or 34.5 million barrels, trade data showed.
The company could not be immediately reached for comment outside office hours. It had previously declined to comment on its Dubai trades.
Dubai's premium to swaps spiked to an all-time high of about $65 a barrel last week as the amount of crude available for trading fell after SP Global Platts excluded three of the five crude grades in anticipation of a prolonged disruption in shipping via the Strait of Hormuz.
The price spike has caused Asian refiners to shun spot Middle East crude purchases and instead buy oil from Europe, Africa and the Americas.
(Reporting by Florence Tan and Siyi Liu; Editing by Michael Perry and Shri Navaratnam)