SINGAPORE: January spot discounts for Qatari condensate hit multi-month lows in Asia on Thursday as demand from splitters declined on weak petrochemical margins.
Operators of condensate splitters turned to buying cheaper naphtha, while the sharp fall in differentials for deodorised field condensate (DFC) and low sulphur condensate (LSC) likely attracted buying interest from refiners, traders said.
Limited demand caused a supply build-up in December with 4-5 cargoes still available for last week, said a trader, adding that they had mostly sold at discounts of about 50 cents a barrel to Dubai quotes.
Tasweeq closed a tender to sell January cargoes and some traders expect discounts to hit as wide as $1 a barrel.
Separately, Banoco Arab Medium's discount for January narrowed sharply on expectation of a lower official selling price for Arab Medium.
Unipec and Shell sold a cargo each of Banoco Arab Medium at 10-20 cents a barrel below the official selling price (OSP) to Hyundai Oilbank and TonenGeneral, a trader said, down from discounts of about $1 in the previous month. The deals could not be independently verified.
South Korea's KOGAS may have sold a VLCC of Basra Light to India's HMEL at 15 cents a barrel below its OSP, traders said. The loading period was not immediately known.
More Kurdish oil could make its way into the market as the government of Iraq and the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region have begun implementing a deal under which Baghdad resumes funding Kurdish civil servant salaries in return for a share of Kurdish oil exports, Iraq's finance minister said.
DME OMAN
DME Oman for January settled at $76.35, down 36 cents, at 0830 GMT. This puts DME Oman at 37 cents a barrel above Dubai swaps, the highest this month, compared with a premium of 18 cents in the previous session.
MARKET NEWS
Iran leased oil storage at Dalian port in China earlier this year and has made at least two deliveries of crude from there to India and one to South Korea, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.
India will soon pay a third tranche of $400 million to Iran ahead of a Nov. 24 deadline to an interim deal with six world powers that allows Tehran to recover part of its overseas frozen oil revenues, industry sources said.
Iran's oil minister said on Thursday he will hold talks with top oil exporter Saudi Arabia about market share when OPEC members meet next week in Vienna as Tehran aims to boost its oil exports after the lifting of sanctions imposed over its nuclear programme.
China made its first official announcement about the country's strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) on Thursday, saying the first phase of the government emergency stockpile is storing about 91 million barrels of crude oil, or about nine days of oil use.
Japan's customs-cleared crude oil imports fell 8.8 percent in October from the same month a year earlier, the Ministry of Finance said.
OPEC will agree as a minimum step to remove crude from the market that it is pumping above the agreed target, a Libyan oil official said, to support prices that hit a four-year low. {ID:nL6N0T92GA]
Russia may cut exports of crude oil and oil products in December as traders expect lower export duties to be enforced from the start of the next year, trading sources told Reuters on Wednesday.
Venezuela's Paraguana refining complex, the OPEC country's biggest, is processing crude at roughly half capacity after power outages this month damaged facilities at Amuay, union leader Ivan Freites said on Wednesday.
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