MOSCOW: Urals crude differentials in the northwest Europe jumped on Wednesday to the highest level in two years on strong refinery margins, as cargoes for loading in the first 20 days of July seem to be placed with the final buyers, traders said.
"The cargoes for loading before July 20 are sold out. (Refinery) margins for Urals are better than for Brent," a source with a major said.
In the Platts window, BP bought from Vitol 100,000 tonnes of Urals for loading in the Baltic on July 20-24 at dated Brent minus $0.70 a barrel, traders said.
That was up by 25 cents from Tuesday assessments and at the highest level since July 10, 2015, Reuters data showed.
In Mediterranean, Eni bid for 80,000 tonnes of Urals for July 20-24 loading at minus $0.90 a barrel, while Litasco bid for a similar cargo on July 26-30 up to minus $0.80 a barrel, but nobody was interested.
There were no bids and offers for Azeri BTC and CPC Blend in the Platts window on Wednesday.
Litasco offered 85,000 tonnes of Siberian Light for July 15-19 loading down to minus $0.20 a barrel without finding a buyer.
Saudi Aramco has raised its Arab Light OSP to Northwest Europe by $0.55 cents for August from the previous month at a discount of $2.55 a barrel to the ICE Brent.
The Federal Court of Canada has ordered the seizure of a 721,915-barrel cargo of crude from Kurdistan aboard the "Neverland" oil tanker on the request of the Iraq Oil Ministry, court documents show.
Iraq claims the cargo was unlawfully misappropriated by the Kurdistan Regional Government and sold to Vitol to be loaded onto the "Neverland". Vitol declined to comment.
Azeri oil exports through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline via Georgia and Turkey fell 11.8 percent year on year in the first half of 2017 to 13.174 million tonnes from 14.930 million tonnes in the same period last year, state energy company SOCAR said on Wednesday.
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