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Energy

New Crude Benchmark in the Works?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Oil industry information leader Platts has proposed establishing a new assessment for sour crude produced in North and South America. The benchmark would be called the Americas Sour Marker (ASM), and includes four sour crudes that Platts already assesses. While ASM is not intended to replace West Texas Intermediate (WTI) as the benchmark price for Americas crude oil, Platts is clearly signaling its intention to minimize the influence of WTI in its assessment processes.

Platts offers two reasons for the proposed change. First, sour crude accounts for about two-thirds of the crude entering US refineries. Second, the company argues that the WTI price does not fully represent US Gulf Coast crude economics.

We noted last month the cost to Americans of having WTI priced lower than foreign crude. Platts is acknowledging that WTI is too rare and too landlocked to serve as the single marker for US crude. The ASM will begin to be quoted on March 16th.

Paul Ausick
March 4, 2009

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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