Stuart Williams
Chief Operating Officer at Intercontinental Exchange
Thank you, Warren, and thank you all for joining us this morning.
Please turn to Slide 8. For over 2 decades, we've worked closely with our customers to develop a network of diverse liquid and globally interconnected energy markets. This network provides the critical feedback loop required to solve near-term supply and demand imbalances and the long-term price signals needed to efficiently allocate capital investment to meet forward-looking demand. Today, our customers across the globe leverage our markets to help balance the demands of energy security, affordability and sustainability while allocating the capital necessary to meet rising energy demands critical to economic growth and managing the risks associated with a complex geopolitical environment.
The breadth and depth of our global platform not only drove another record quarter across our energy complex, but importantly, it positions us to capture secular tailwinds, including the globalization of natural gas and the clean energy transition, trends we began investing in over a decade ago. Through constant reinvention and innovation, Brent has firmly established itself as the global benchmark for crude oil, pricing roughly 3/4 of the world's internationally traded crude and from which prices are discovered in the US Gulf Coast via ICE's Midland WTI futures market and in the Middle East and Asia via ICE's Murban and Dubai futures markets.
Reflecting this dynamic, volume in our global oil complex increased 17% year-over-year. This strong performance includes records across Brent, WTI, Midland WTI and Murban and contributed to record oil revenues, which grew 16% in the quarter. These strong trends have continued into October with record total oil open interest up 28% and Brent options up 86% year-over-year. These critical pricing relationships extend to refined oil products, where ICE's low sulfur gas oil markets similarly anchors price discovery for refined products globally with markets such as ICE's heating oil futures and ICE Singapore gas oil, reflecting regional dynamics in the US and Asia, respectively.
We continue to see strong growth across refined products with gas oil open interest up 63% year-over-year, supporting double-digit growth across the refined products complex, including growth in cleaner fuels such as ICE's global marine fuel and biofuel markets. Today, cleaner energy sources, including global natural gas and environmental markets account for roughly 45% of our energy revenues, up from 1/3 a decade ago, and have grown 21% on average over the past 5 years, including 34% growth year-to-date. This strong performance has been a key contributor to the 13% average growth rate in our energy platform over that time frame, including 29% growth year-to-date.
The globalization of natural gas through liquefied natural gas or LNG has created virtual pipelines across oceans, removing the dependency on fixed pipeline infrastructure and storage. This, together with the ongoing liberalization of the natural gas market, and buyers increasingly favoring short-term contracts and spot market procurement, has put the more natural gas in motion over longer distances with a greater number of touch points along the value chain from production to consumption, creating a truly global commodity. Furthermore, given its abundance, lower emissions and lower switching costs, we expect natural gas to continue to benefit from increasing energy demand particularly in the developing world and the ongoing focus on decarbonization.
Since the year 2000, energy consumption in non-OECD countries has more than doubled with much of this growth coming in the form of coal. Last year, global coal consumption hit an all-time high, primarily supported by Asia, where coal still accounts for nearly 50% of the region's energy supply. According to statistics published by the Energy Institute, the coal switching opportunity in Asia alone represents more energy than the total energy consumption in North America across all primary energy sources.
In addition, the power demands of accelerating innovation, including artificial intelligence, are expected to require significant new generation capacity boosting demand for natural gas. These factors have caused markets across Europe, Asia and North America to become increasingly interconnected, accelerating demand for deep, liquid and global risk management tools. This evolution has driven the development of new trading relationships as illustrated by record participation in our natural gas portfolio in the third quarter. This has been accompanied by volume and revenue growth with each growing double digits on average over the past 5 years, including 34% and 32% growth year-to-date, respectively.
In addition, open interest trends remained strong through October, up 27% year-over-year, including a 51% increase in our TTF complex, a 53% increase in our Asian JKM market and a 24% increase in our North American gas business. As the Brents of natural gas, our total transfer facility benchmark or TTF, continues to be relied upon by an increasing number of market participants with market participation growing 15% on average over the past 5 years. In the third quarter, volumes in our TTF complex increased 16% year-over-year driving revenue growth of 19% versus 2023. In Asia, underpinned by surging economic growth and a focus towards cleaner forms of energy, our Japan and Korea market, or JKM, continues to reach important milestones, setting records across key liquidity indicators in the third quarter, including participation, volume and open interest.
Importantly, the extent to which global gas markets are interconnected was once again reinforced by JKM execution patterns with over 60% of JKM volumes executed via the JKM TTF spread. In North America, market participants seeking to manage exposure to US natural gas pricing dynamics continue to gravitate towards ICE's Henry Hub contracts for the liquidity ICE offers in longer-dated tenants, along with the linkage to our exclusive regional basis markets which spans 70 trading hubs across North America. In the third quarter, volume in our North American gas complex increased 39% year-over-year.
Finally, with Canada expected to significantly ramp up its LNG export capacity from 2025, increased exports from the West Coast of North America to Asia should add a further dimension to the supply equation. ICE's Calgary-based Natural Gas Exchange, or ICE NGX, has operated in the Alberta natural gas and electricity futures market for 30 years, developing the AECO Hub into one of North America's most liquid spot and forward energy markets. ICE offers liquid markets in TTF, JKM, Henry Hub and the North American basis markets such as AECO, offering a broad range of natural gas benchmarks with trading hubs across Europe, Asia and North America. As the global landscape of LNG exports, geopolitical forces and shift towards cleaner energy all continue to evolve, we see these dynamics continuing to favor our growing global gas complex well into the future.
As policy discussions on how best to deliver global sustainability objectives continue to evolve, our liquid and transparent environmental markets, first launched almost 2 decades ago, continue to see growth, providing transparent, market-based pricing for both positive and negative externalities. Here, we have seen the number of active market participants grow double digits on average over the past 5 years, including record participation in the third quarter, up 14% year-over-year. At the same time, our North American environmental complex reached record volumes in the quarter, increasing 70% versus prior year.
While volumes in our European emission allowance futures and options increased 45%, this strong performance has contributed to the 49% growth in our environmental revenues year-to-date including 60% growth in the third quarter. In summary, as the confluence of increasing energy demand, evolving supply chains and the energy transition continues to introduce new complexities, uncertainties and volatility into energy markets, our global environmental markets, alongside our global gas, oil, coal and power markets, provide the critical price transparency and risk management tools that will enable participants to navigate this multilayered and nonlinear transition.
Before I hand over to Jeff, I wanted to briefly touch on our interest rate markets, which hit record volume during the quarter, increasing 50% year-over-year. A mixed inflation picture, low unemployment, weaker economic data and ongoing geopolitical uncertainty continue to drive demand for interest rate risk management. ICE's liquid multicurrency, short-term interest rate complex includes the key benchmark Euribor, SONIA and SARON markets used to manage short-term interest rate risk in euros, pound sterling and Swiss francs, respectively. As the benchmark for managing short-term euro interest rate risk, ICE's Euribor volume increased 47% year-over-year in the third quarter with open interest up 15% in October.
The latest addition to ICE's multicurrency STIR complex, the euro short-term rate, or ESTER, continues to break records across all liquidity metrics, including open interest hitting a record 681,000 contracts during October. ICE Sonia market, the benchmark for managing UK interest rate risk traded a record 14 million contracts in September, contributing to a 53% growth year-to-date. Trends towards the end of October remained robust with open interest up 71%. ICE also hosts the Gilt futures market, the benchmark for the UK government bond yield curve, where volume is up 30% year-to-date, including 42% growth in the third quarter with open interest up 92% year-over-year. The disparity between the expected relative parts for the Central Banks has been a consistence theme over the last year. This has been beneficial for our rates franchise, both in terms of volume and open interest and looks set to continue as our customers rely on the deep liquidity and capital efficiencies at ICE.
With that I'll hand it over to Jeff.
