SINGAPORE: The Asia-Pacific crude market held steady on Monday as traders look ahead to tenders for more price direction, while Malaysia's Petronas offered more cargoes.
MALAYSIA
Malaysia's Petronas is offering spot cargoes of Kimanis and Bintulu, traders said, though details of the cargoes were not immediately available.
AUSTRALIA
Japan's Inpex may have sold a March-loading Van Gogh cargo at a premium of about $1 a barrel to Dated Brent on a delivered basis, traders said.
This could work out to about a discount of 30 to 50 cents a barrel on a free-on-board basis, one of them said, depending on how the cargo will be loaded.
A February-loading Van Gogh cargo had rolled over to March, illustrating the weakness in the market, traders have said.
INDONESIA
Indonesia's Pertamina is still in negotiations to buy condensate cargoes for March, traders said. Firm demand from Pertamina's TPPI splitter should keep the premiums firm, one of the traders said.
VIETNAM
Vietnam's PV Oil may have sold a March-loading Ruby cargo at a premium of $3 to $3.30 a barrel to Dated Brent, traders said.
The buyer could have been Shell, one of them said, though this could not be confirmed.
BRENT-DUBAI EFS
Prompt-month Brent's premium to Dubai swaps <DUB-EFS-1M> was at $3.40 per barrel, steady from Friday's close.
NEWS
The global oil market is stabilising as crude inventories are falling, Iraqi Oil Minister Jabar al-Luabi said on Monday in Baghdad.
The market "is heading in the right direction ... it will continue to stabilise until the end of the year" he said.
Some Middle East crude oil grades have fallen into discounts against their benchmarks for sales to Asia in March, a sign of a weakening market, as fuel oil margins have declined, curbing refiners' appetites for the oil, multiple trade sources said on Monday.
Egypt this month renewed a contract to import 12 million barrels of Iraqi crude oil over the next year, an official at state petroleum buyer EGPC said on Sunday.
Global oil producers are in agreement that they should continue cooperating on production after their deal on supply cuts expires at the end of this year, Saudi Arabia's energy minister Khalid al-Falih said on Sunday.
Shares of India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp Ltd jumped as much as 6.3 percent on Monday after the explorer said it would buy a majority stake in refiner Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd for a smaller premium than expected.
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