Derek Sammann
Senior Managing Director, Global Head of Commodities, Options & International Markets at CME Group
Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Appreciate the question, Alex. So when -- as Terry mentioned at the top of the call, the breadth and the scale, the diversity of the franchise here is, I think, yielding benefits for shareholders and certainly providing multiple ways that our customers use us to manage risk. Energy delivered strong results in first quarter this year up 16%. When you look at the significant participant of where that business is growing, we saw the fastest growth for our biostatic commercial customers, and we saw record options level at the overall level as well.
When you look at energy being a key contributor to our non-US growth, our non-US growth in energy was up 38% this year, as well as our record options volume up almost 60%, that's helping to drive a strong RPC of a little over $1.33 in the energy business. When you look at the core benchmark products, and I'll come back to the point Terry just made, when you compare our WTI contracts to ICE's WTI contracts, our market share in Q1 was flat with Q4, about 74%. When you look at our WTI options against ICE's WTI options, we actually saw an increase in market share to 89% from 86%. So where we compete directly with ICE, we are either maintaining or growing that market share.
So, but let me talk a little bit about what's actually going on. When the US is actually producing and exporting crude oil at record levels, follow that physical flow. And what does that mean? That means we have new and record amounts of non-US customers that have exposure to US crude and also Henry Hub to the same degree. So, that's an increasing set of customer participants that we have not seen before, which is why when you look at where the growth is happening in our WTI complex particularly, we're seeing our non-US WTI growth of up 30% and our commercial customers up 21%.
So, the very customers, whether it's the buy side of the commercial customers that are looking for that open interest and looking for the best exposure for the energy markets are coming to CME WTI to manage that risk. The other parts of the franchise that Terry talked about, our WTI franchise isn't just our WTI futures and options, it's our grades contracts which continues to grow. We actually just exceeded our open interest in our grades contracts, exceeding 600,000 contracts. That's up almost 50% year-on-year to a new record.
And Alex, that's important because 80% of that open interest holding is with commercial customers that have exposure to the global export market out of the US and into Europe and Asia. So, when we think about that growth in the client segments and the regional growth, it's reflective of the physical flows going out into the rest of the world.
Pivoting over to the benchmark Henry Hub side of the market, I'll say a similar thing to what Terry just talked about. When we look at our Henry Hub franchise, compare that to ICE's Henry Hub franchise, you actually see that not only have we set a record total Henry Hub volume for futures and options in first quarter of this year, but we've also hit records of underlying options as well.
From a competitive perspective, we actually grew our market share to 81% versus 80% last year, and that's up from 77% in 2022. And our options business was actually up as well. And I think we're up at 66% market share, up from 59% market share last year. So, we want to be clear. And I think Terry laid this out well, in the markets where we have competitive dynamics, where we have our Henry Hub contracts against listed elsewhere, our WTI contracts against listed elsewhere, we're maintaining stable share, and we're growing the OI.
So with that, I'll pass it back to you.
