Crude Oil Quality Association
(COQA)

RBN Energy’s daily blog, published November 19, 2018, titled The Race Is On - Houston Crude Oil Futures Contracts Compete For Market Share by Laura Blewitt provides an excellent overview of the three futures contracts involving WTI crude oil.  Included are details of the logistics and crude quality specifications associated with each contract.

These three similar, but different contracts are:

• CME Group’s Light Sweet Crude delivered at Cushing- described in NYMEX Rulebook Chapter 200.  The COQA has been instrumental in development of the new specifications that will take effect January 2019.  Data for streams at Cushing can be found on the data portal crudemonitor.us.

• CME Group’s WTI delivered at Houston.  This new contract was launched November 5, 2018, and details are found in NYMEX Rulebook Chapter 201.

• Intercontinental Exchange’s (ICE) contract, officially called “Permian WTI (Houston)”.  Quality specifications are found in Magellan’s BridgeTex and Longhorn pipeline tariff documents. API Gravity, Sulfur, Vapor Pressure, and BS & W data are shown on the ICE web site.

A summary of the different quality specifications (for the relevant properties) is as follows: 

On July 25, the first ever European Crude Quality Forum was hosted by Intertek at their research and laboratory facility in Aberdeen, Scotland.  Coordinated by Dr. Frederick Stubbins of Intertek, the program included a buffet lunch followed by a half day of technical presentations including:

• Andrew Duncan, Intertek- Asset Integrity Management
• Duncan Baillie, LUX Assure- What’s In Your Crude?
• Frederick Stubbins, Intertek- Total Quality Assurance from Well Stream to Forecourt
• Dennis Sutton, COQA- Introduction to the COQA; An overview of North American Crude Oil Quality
• Katharine Fogg, Essar Oil UK- Opportunity Oil Processing in European Refineries
• Ruth Downie, Infineum- Wax and Asphaltenes

Over 160 attendees gathered May 22-24 at Denver’s Grand Hyatt hotel for the sixth international joint meeting of the Crude Oil Quality Association (COQA) and the Canadian Crude Quality Technical Association (CCQTA).  The meetings featured a half-day session of subcommittee and board meetings, followed by two full days of presentations.

With the December 2017 announcement by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) that they would begin implementing the COQA recommended specifications for Light Sweet Crude (WTI), beginning in January of 2019, there was a great deal of interest in this topic.  Dan Brusstar, Senior Director of Energy Research at CME emphasized the benefits of the adoption of the COQA specs, including:

• Mid-continent refiners benefit from stable and certain quality
• Stable WTI quality will transform the global market, and
• A “new era” will dawn for global refiners

An insightful look at the Canadian oil industry was provided by Jeff Gaulin, Vice President of Communications with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP).  Jeff discussed the challenge the industry faces in developing trust among Canadians, particularly regarding growth projects.  His talk, which was somewhat of a call to action for the Canadian oil industry, proved rather timely with the announcement the following week that the Canadian government would buy Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline, in order to ensure the halted project gets built.

Dr. David Lord of Sandia National Laboratories updated the group on the recently released report “DOE/DOT Crude Oil Characterization Research Study”.  Drivers for this research include the open debate on whether the types of crude have significant bearing on the severity of transportation accidents.  Information reported at this time pertained to issues of sampling and analysis methods.  Future work will address combustion experiments and modeling, and comparison of light, tight oil vs. more conventional crude.

The Crude Oil Quality Association (“COQA”) is pleased to recognize that CME Group has published a Special Executive Report announcing changes regarding the quality specifications of Light Sweet Crude as defined in their Futures contracts. Their report is accompanied by a Q & A section that provides additional detail. The COQA has been a key resource to CME Group in developing these specifications by providing open forum meetings and the data portal crudemonitor.us.

The amended specifications add five additional parameters in characterizing West Texas Intermediate (WTI)/ Domestic Sweet crude oil.  These parameters address:

• Distillation characteristics
• Vanadium content
• Nickel content
• Total Acid Number (TAN), and
• Micro carbon residue content