SINGAPORE: The Asia-Pacific crude market was steady on Monday with spot premiums for Russia's ESPO Blend unchanged from the previous month.
Surgut sold two 730,000-barrel cargoes of ESPO Blend in a spot tender for loading on March 1-6 and 6-11 at premiums of $4.60-$4.70 a barrel to Dubai swaps, traders said. The identity of the buyers remained unknown.
The results were in line with recent deals for the Russian grade. Some traders expected values for March-loading ESPO Blend cargoes to firm, as a wide Brent-Dubai spread should support Dubai-linked grades.
Petroleum Brunei will close a tender on Monday to sell 600,000 barrels of Kimanis crude loading on March 14-18.
PV Oil will close a tender on Monday to sell two March-loading cargoes of Ruby crude.
January cargoes of South Sudan's Dar Blend were traded at a discount of around $13 a barrel to dated Brent, a trader said.
PetroIneos is expected to ship a cargo of Ekofisk to China this month, a relatively rare development according to Reuters shipping data.
MARKET NEWS
Iran is ready to increase its crude oil exports by 500,000 barrels a day, the deputy oil minister said on Sunday, hours after international sanctions on Tehran were lifted, removing an obstacle to exports.
Iraq's' exports from the southern region have been running at an average daily rate of 3.297 million barrels per day (bpd) so far this month, higher than December's average, unaffected by tribal clashes, a company executive said on Saturday.
Oil and gas workers saw their salaries fall 1.4 percent over the past year after a sharp decline in oil prices forced their employers to trim costs, but their average global salaries remain high at more than $80,000 a year.
Japan's Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) signed a loan agreement on Sunday with the United Arab Emirate's state-owned oil company Abu Dhabi National Oil Co for up to $2.1 billion to help secure long-term oil supplies.
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