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ABU DHABI / WAM
Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) today announced record trading activity in Murban crude with ICE Futures Abu Dhabi (IFAD) marking its third anniversary.
IFAD and ICE’s Murban futures market launched in Abu Dhabi in March 2021 with ADNOC and nine of the world’s largest energy traders as founding partners. Murban is the UAE’s flagship crude grade, supplied by ADNOC to meet global demand and is considered one of the lowest carbon emission crude oils in the world.
In the first quarter of 2024, ICE’s Murban futures market hit a record traded volume of over 1.1 billion barrels and in March reached a record average daily volume of 21,454,000 barrels, up 152 percent year-over-year (YoY). On April 15, 2024, Murban futures hit a single-day volume record with 36,464,000 barrels traded. Murban futures have reached a series of open interest (OI) records through the start of 2024 with OI up 25 percent YoY.
“Three years on from launch, we, together with ADNOC and our partners, have built a truly global Murban futures market which sits alongside benchmark crude grades Brent and Midland WTI,” said Gary King, President, ICE Futures Abu Dhabi. “ADNOC’s vision to move the official selling price for Murban to forward pricing based on ICE Murban futures opened Murban to a global audience and it now has international reach and relevance in the global crude market. This is further reflected by Bloomberg’s decision to launch a Murban crude oil index aimed at tracking the performance of Murban futures.”
Since IFAD launched, almost 6 billion barrels of Murban crude oil have been traded and 244 million barrels of Murban have been delivered through IFAD. Over 150 participants have traded on IFAD to date from across Asia, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including commercial and financial participants.
Murban is integral to ICE’s thriving global oil complex covering over 800 futures and options contracts, centred around Brent which is used to price over three-quarters of the world’s internationally traded crude oil. ICE’s extensive global commodity markets, including benchmark oil and natural gas contracts, hit record trading activity in the first quarter of 2024 with almost 5 million contracts traded per day, surpassing the previous record set in the first quarter of 2020, which highlights IFAD’s continued success.