SINGAPORE: Cash Dubai weakened in the Middle East crude market on Tuesday after Chinaoil sold 25 partials during Platts' price assessment process.
The trading arm of PetroChina turned into a seller this month after a bull play in October.
Chinaoil bought partials from Shell and Mercuria mostly at $62.40-$62.45 a barrel, traders said. It will deliver an Upper Zakum cargo to Shell, they said.
Iraqi Basrah Light crude remained competitive after SOMO cut its January OSP to the lowest in at least 10 years to minus $4.00 a barrel versus the Dubai/Oman average from minus $2.50 a barrel in December.
SOMO was less aggressive in its pricing this month, a trader said, as Basrah's price gap with Saudi Arab Medium narrowed to 55 cents from 90 cents a month earlier.
Saudi Arabia, the world's top crude exporter, will keep supplies at full contracted volumes for Asian term buyers in January, industry sources said on Tuesday.
BHP Billiton Ltd has sold its first cargo of processed condensate from the United States via a tender to U.S. firm Koch, traders said.
DME OMAN
DME Oman for February settled at $63.64 a barrel, down $2.36, at 0830 GMT. This puts DME Oman at 49 cents a barrel below Dubai swaps, against a discount of 51 cents in the previous session.
REFINERY
Japanese oil refiner TonenGeneral Sekiyu KK said on Tuesday it shut the sole 156,000 barrels per day CDU at its Sakai refinery in western Japan on Sunday after a fire at a pipeline of a secondary unit.
Jurong Aromatics Corp (JAC) plans to stop operations at its petrochemical complex in Singapore from mid-December for maintenance, a company spokesman said.
MARKET NEWS
Market fundamentals and high-cost crude producers, rather than OPEC, are the ones that will set a fair price for oil in coming months, a United Arab Emirates oil official said on Tuesday.
Phillips 66 is seeking a permit to build a condensate splitter at the company's 247,000 bpd refinery in Sweeny, Texas as the company mulls the export of condensate, a super-light form of crude oil without violating a decades-old U.S. crude export ban.
New Zealand awarded 15 oil and gas exploration licences on Tuesday, with U.S. giant Chevron and India's ONGC Videsh joining the hunt in the South Pacific country for the first time.
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