KAPSARC held a workshop on Crude and Refined Products Markets on November 10, 2014 in Riyadh. The first workshop in this series tackled oil markets and their responses to the evolving geography of supply and demand and relative costs in the value chain. Topics discussed covered the reconfiguring of global oil markets with respect to oil processing and product flows, the impact of the surge of tight oil production in the US, international downstream integration for NOCs, market share objectives and their effects on inter-regional price differentials, new crude pricing norms in the price discovery process, and the role of price reporting agencies (PRAs) and formal derivative exchanges.

Workshop participants included delegates from Asian and American universities; multilateral institutions and think tanks including EPRINC, IEA, and Columbia University SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy; Price Reporting Agencies Platts and Argus; the commodity exchange ICE Futures; government agencies such as the EIA; and representatives from NOCs and IOCs, such as Total and Qatar Petroleum.