ADNOC will price all of its crude grades off prompt-month Platts Dubai from 1 November, replacing the Murban futures contract as the basis for its official selling prices. The physical importance of Murban — its volume, its quality and its loading point outside the Strait of Hormuz — is unaffected, but the change resets how term buyers hedge and settle.
ADNOC has said it will change the benchmark for the monthly official selling prices of all its crude grades to prompt-month Platts Dubai, replacing the Murban futures contract that has set those prices since 2021. The change takes effect on 1 November and applies across the Abu Dhabi onshore and offshore slate — Murban, Das, Umm Lulu and Upper Zakum.
For an industrial reader the distinction worth holding on to is that this is a pricing decision, not a production or logistics one. Nothing about the barrel changes. Murban remains the flagship Abu Dhabi grade, produced from ADNOC Onshore's fields, and at roughly 1.6 to 1.8 million barrels a day it accounts for more than half of total UAE crude output and ranks among the largest individual crude streams traded anywhere. It is a light, low-sulphur crude, which is why refiners value it: it yields a higher proportion of middle distillates and needs less hydrotreating than the medium sour grades that make up most Middle Eastern export supply.
The commercial structure around it is unusually international for a national oil company's flagship stream. ADNOC holds 60 per cent of ADNOC Onshore, with the remaining 40 per cent split among bp, TotalEnergies, China National Petroleum Corporation, Zhenhua Oil, Japan's Inpex and South Korea's GS Energy. Those partners lift entitlement barrels directly, which means a substantial share of Murban production reaches the market through companies that are themselves refiners or refinery affiliates in Asia. Term and spot cargoes go to Japan, China, South Korea, Thailand and India.
Murban's other structural advantage is where it loads. The grade is exported from Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman, outside the Strait of Hormuz, rather than from a terminal inside the Gulf. For a refiner in Northeast Asia buying on an FOB basis, that removes a chokepoint from the voyage and, in periods of regional tension, from the insurance calculation as well. It is a physical characteristic no pricing formula changes.
What the futures contract added on top of that was a transparent, exchange-cleared price. Murban futures launched in March 2021 on ICE Futures Abu Dhabi as a physically delivered contract, FOB Fujairah, and ADNOC removed destination restrictions from all its crude grades in the run-up to the launch so that cargoes could trade freely — a precondition for a contract that settles into physical delivery. The instrument grew: by the first quarter of 2024 it had traded more than 1.1 million lots, with average daily volume in March that year up around 150 per cent on the previous year and a single-session record of 36,464 contracts the following month.
Against that history, the switch to Platts Dubai is a notable reversal of direction, and the market has read it that way. Traders have been unwinding Murban futures positions since the announcement, which is the mechanical consequence of the contract no longer being the settlement reference for ADNOC's term barrels. A futures contract used primarily to hedge exposure to a specific OSP loses much of its open interest when that OSP moves to a different index.
For refiners and term buyers the practical effects are narrow but real. Most Asian refiners already run their Middle East crude books against Dubai; Saudi Aramco, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and Iraq's SOMO all price the region's east-bound barrels off Dubai-linked structures. Buying Abu Dhabi grades on the same index removes a basis mismatch that procurement and risk teams have carried since 2021, when Murban barrels had to be hedged against one curve and everything else against another. Against that, buyers lose a benchmark that reflected the specific quality and loading location of the crude they were actually taking, and take on the quality spread between a light sweet-leaning grade and a medium sour basket as an exposure to be managed rather than a number set by the seller.
The move also says something about how ADNOC now weighs price discovery against liquidity. Building an independent benchmark requires persuading enough of the market to transact against it; adopting the incumbent index instead trades that ambition for the depth of a curve the whole region already uses. Both are defensible positions for a producer of this size. What has not changed is the underlying asset — a 1.6-plus million barrel a day light crude stream, contracted to some of the largest refiners in Asia, loading from a terminal outside the Strait of Hormuz. That, rather than the index it settles against, is what makes Murban matter to the people who run refineries.