IB's help page for futures options margin says to use the "Check Margin" operation in TWS to see what the margin impact will be. I'm consistently seeing the opening margin to buy-to-open a near-the-money CL March 2015 call option, during regular trading hours, to be 14% higher than the value of the option, (e.g. a $2.80 option uses $3200 in margin). Is that normal?
Seems to be related to the fact that I'm also long CL. In fact, if I go long a put, it increases my available margin by around 1.3x the value of the option.