CHANGE: Brent Oil Set to Disappear as Crude-Price Benchmark Lives On.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC is expected next year to plug the last remaining Brent oil wells, located in the North Sea’s East Shetland Basin, about 115 miles northeast of Scotland’s Shetland Islands. The closures mark the end of an era, as the industry shifts its focus to smaller oil finds near existing infrastructure.

Many companies are shutting down platforms above massive fields discovered in the 1970s, but Brent stands apart as one of the first and most significant of these finds. The field has generated billions of dollars for Shell, its partner in the field, Exxon Mobil Corp. and the U.K. government.

In the late 1980s, Brent crude became the benchmark on which most of the world’s oil is priced and is still used to set the price of the multi-trillion dollar Intercontinental Exchange Brent futures market.

Keep on frackin’.