SINGAPORE: The Asia-Pacific crude market held steady on Friday as traders looked ahead to tenders for price direction.
Petroleum Brunei issued a tender to sell two Kimanis cargoes while CPC is seeking sweet crude in another tender.
The outlook for August-loading cargoes is mixed, a trader said, as weak margins could weigh on demand while a narrower Brent-Dubai price spread would be supportive for spot
differentials.
Indonesia is considering adding global oil benchmarks Brent and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) to its crude pricing formula to reduce volatility, an energy ministry official said on Friday, possibly the first adjustment to its crude price reference since 2007.
"We expect to implement it soon, next month," Wiratmaja Puja, director general of oil and gas at the ministry, told reporters.
Russian ESPO premiums slipped after Trafigura sold two cargoes loading in early August at lower levels, traders said.
Brent's premium to Dubai swaps, or Brent-Dubai Exchange of Futures for Swaps (EFS), edged down 1 cent to $3.40 a barrel for August.
China ordered at least 255 Shanghai-based industrial facilities to fully or partially shut down for 14 days in a bid to reduce pollution ahead of the G20 summit, according to an official document.
Shanghai Petrochemical Corp, a subsidiary refinery of state refiner Sinopec Corp, will reduce its capacity by 50 percent, or about 120,000 barrels per day (bpd), for the event during those two weeks, the document said.
An official with Sinopec's Jinling Petrochemical Corp, another major refinery based in the city of Nanjing in neighbouring Jiangsu province, said his firm was also asked by local authorities to "appropriately reduce throughput", but was not given any specific size for the reductions.
China granted independent refiner Wudi Xinyue Ran Hua Co a final 2.4 million tonnes oil import quota, the state planner said on Friday.
MARKET NEWS
Global oil majors Chevron Corp and Royal Dutch Shell Plc are putting small refineries on the auction block as they look to trim lower-margin assets in the face of headwinds from rising crude oil prices.
Venezuelan oil minister Eulogio del Pino said on Thursday that fellow OPEC member Iran would reach pre-sanction oil output levels by September, allowing a revival of talks on a global oil production freeze.
Freight rates for very large crude carriers (VLCCs), which hit multi-month lows this week on reduced tanker demand, could fall further before recovering towards the end of this month, ship brokers said.
Russia's Sakhalin Energy has called a tender to build a third production line at the Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on Russia's Sakhalin island in the Pacific, the company said on Thursday.
Global oil company chiefs showed up in force at Russia's main investor show on Thursday, but deals were slow to materialise as they blamed low crude prices for cutting their scope to invest.
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