[bratticus]

Commodities daily: Say hello to $100 crude
By Javier Blas - FT Published: January 17 2011

... some of those exotically named crudes, such as Tapis of Indonesia, Bonny Light of Nigeria and Daqing of China, all traded above $100 a barrel.

[Tanada]

Pardon me but none of these non-American/non-UK benchmark crudes are obscure to anyone who has even looked at a commodity table for world crude exchanges.

[bratticus]

Pardon me but none of these non-American/non-UK benchmark crudes are obscure to anyone who has even looked at a commodity table for world crude exchanges.

I rest my case.

(your post confirms their obscurity)

[sparky]

@ Bratticus : Tapis is the benchmark for East Asia , that's China , Japan , Korea , Taiwan and Australia
Bonny light is not a benchmark it's a crude grade , it used to be part of the OPEC basket, Same for Daiquin , it's an oil grade
in the oil industry oil is named after the field it is extracted from ,
it has a known depreciation over the benchmark if it is more difficult to refine sulfur content and API value are the main factors

other benchmarks are:
Brent for Europe and Africa , west of Suez and Dubai an emerging benchmark
Russia has set up a benchmark of its own called Espo

An oil trading companies would be trading on some or all of those at the same times often a supertanker of crude would be sold several times during its trip , even rerouted or send to Norwegian fjords , waiting , like happened during 2009 . The trading houses creamed the speculators of billions of bucks

There is three main problem with West Texas Intermediate
-Most contracts are traded by non users for speculation ,a trend which is increasing the quantities delivered to actual refineries is a small fraction of the trade
-There is no West Texas crude left , it's a composite blend now and light sweet crude are getting depleted first
-the settlement of contracts is taken as Cushing the crossroad of a network of pipelines delivering the crude from the South to Eastern seaboard and Midwest refineries since those are not running full on because of the recession, storage are high and delivered prices are low , it's a regional issue decoupled from the " real " world situation .

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/01 ... mark-wars/

P.S. Tanada is right , check things , I recommend Wikipedia as a starting point

[sparky]

Errata , got my crude mixed up ,Bonny light is still in the OPEC basket

from the OPEC site
http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/data_gr ... b=annually

The new OPEC Reference Basket (ORB): Introduced on 16 June 2005, is currently made up of the following: Saharan Blend (Algeria), Girassol (Angola), Oriente (Ecuador), Iran Heavy (Islamic Republic of Iran), Basra Light (Iraq), Kuwait Export (Kuwait), Es Sider (Libya), Bonny Light (Nigeria), Qatar Marine (Qatar), Arab Light (Saudi Arabia), Murban (UAE) and Merey (Venezuela).

Notes:
* As of January 2006: The Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly & Yearly averages are based on daily quotations.
* As of January 2007: The basket price includes the Angolan crude "Girassol".
* As of 19 October 2007: The basket price includes the Ecuadorean crude "Oriente".
* As of January 2009: The basket price excludes the Indonesian crude "Minas".
* As of January 2009: The Venezuelan crude "BCF-17" was replaced by the crude "Merey".

[bratticus]

P.S. Tanada is right , check things , I recommend Wikipedia as a starting point

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/obscure