Asian Refiners Diversify Away from Middle Eastern Oil

Asian refiners are reducing their intake of Middle Eastern oil in favor of crude from the United States and Brazil. The move comes amid shrinking margins and rising Saudi oil prices—even as international benchmarks remain largely range-bound. Yet the diversification is, for the time being, quite moderate, with Saudi Arabia still the top supplier to Asia as a whole, far ahead of both the United States and Brazil.

Whether this would turn into a trend is uncertain because there are all those barrels of relatively cheap Russian crude, too. Reuters’s…