PLATTS WORKS TO ENSURE INTEGRITY OF N. SEA BRENT OIL BENCHMARK.

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NEW YORK, July 2 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --

Platts, the world's leading energy information provider and a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP), today said it will further enhance its methodology for assessing the price of Dated Brent crude oil, the world's premier oil benchmark.

Platts currently determines its Dated Brent assessment by tracking the most competitively priced of Brent, Forties, Oseberg and Ekofisk crudes produced in the North Sea. On June 7, 2007, Platts implemented a quality threshold of 0.6 per cent sulfur for Forties crude oil to be considered in Platts' North Sea assessments. Today Platts is further enhancing the quality standard on Forties crude by introducing a "price de-escalator" that will adjust downward the price of oil delivered by a seller to a buyer at sulfur levels above 0.6 per cent.

Both actions were taken to ensure the integrity of the benchmark and to maintain the continuity of the assessment process reflecting consistent quality in crude oil grades. Today's action followed a constructive dialogue with oil industry participants about implementing a mechanism to deal with cases where the crude oil delivered contains sulfur exceeding the 0.6 per cent quality parameter.

"We believe the enhancements to our assessment methodology will help bring greater transparency to this complex market," said Dan Tanz, editorial vice president at Platts. "Platts consulted intensively with the industry over a period of weeks and considered a number of options to improve the workability of the quality standard. In the end the options narrowed to two: either remove Forties from the assessment process, or introduce a quality standard to contend with potential erratic price behaviour of the Forties blend. We chose the second option as we believe Forties serves the valuable purpose of providing a sufficient volume of crude to underpin the benchmark. We believe that greater volume underpinning a benchmark ensures wider market representation and an assessment reflective of market value."

Dated Brent is used in spot and long-term contracts to value around 60 per cent of the 85 million barrels of crude oil produced in global oil markets each day. According to a press release on June 7 by the Forties Pipeline System (FPS), the summer quality of Forties crude oil will be significantly downgraded as a result of field maintenance activities. FPS said the Forties crude blend beginning in August will contain a significantly higher percentage of Buzzard, a more sulfurous and heavier crude oil. Since sulfur is an impurity that lowers the value of a crude oil, this would result in a distortion in the value ...