Platts, the provider of physicals and futures markets prices affiliated with McGraw Hill Financial, says that it is going to launch a new price reference for Dated Brent CIF Rotterdam. That’s not obviously a stop-the-presses moment, even for the oil markets, but it is worth a pause.

The problem for Platts and for Brent in general as a world benchmark is that there isn’t enough of the defining crude any longer. Over 2015, as the announcement says, there were “healthy available supplies averaging 53 cargoes a month.” But the estimate is that supplies will decline to 38 cargoes by 2020, and to just 20 by 2025.

The new assessment solves this conundrum by merging North Sea production with other streams of crude oil that pass through Rotterdam, including Nigerian crude.

Long Downward Slide Halted

This comes at a time when the economics of crude oil, especially the halt of its long downward slide, is headline news. In early January, ICE February Brent passed the $35 level on the way down, the first time in a decade. Then it kept going down, getting below $30 late in that month before the movement reversed. There was another V-like bounce in February. Now (mid-March) the price is back above $40, still of course a staggeringly low price compared to the $110 per barrel expectations of early 2014.

Brent is half of a now-venerable puzzle: why and how reliably are the Brent and the WTI indexes correlated? They index prices for the same commodity, crude oil, and that commodity is (largely, though not perfectly) fungible throughout the world.

WTI, like Brent, passed the $35 mark in early January of this year, kept going, struck resistance and bounced back from $30 later that month. But there’s a deeper “V” for the price in mid-February of the WTI charts than there is in mid-February of the Brent charts. In other words, January and February together make up a “W” for the price of crude under either pricing system, but the “W” is lopsided to the right of the WTI chart, and to the left of the Brent chart.  At present the price of crude is about $2 cheaper on WTI than on the Brent chart.