Mubasher: Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) is set to remove all destination restrictions for all its crude oil grades ahead of launching its Murban futures contract, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

ADNOC has signed initial agreements with Rongsheng Petrochemicals and Unipec to study the use of Murban futures with Chinese end-users, Khaled Salmeen, ADNOC’s Executive Director, Marketing, Sales, and Trading told the news agency.

“This is to create more freely traded commodity that can be traded on the global markets.

“We believe that the removal of the restrictions will bring additional value to our customers and at the same time to ADNOC,” Salmeen added.

The Murban crude futures would be traded on the new local exchange, ICE Futures Abu Dhabi (IFAD).

The exchange will be owned by Abu Dhabi, a number of oil companies, and the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), in which Brent crude futures are traded.

Murban futures will become an alternative benchmark to the standard Dubai/Oman benchmarks operated by S&P Global Platts and the Dubai Mercantile Exchange (DME).

BP, Total, Inpex, Vitol, Shell, Petrochina, South Korea’s GS Caltex, Japan’s JXTG and Thailand’s PTT have reportedly all agreed on participating in the exchange.