The OPEC+ alliance bases its decisions on oil market fundamentals, not on political bias, the energy minister of OPEC’s de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, said on Monday, reiterating previous comments from OPEC+ that it is looking at the markets when agreeing on oil production levels.
The decisions of the OPEC+ alliance, which is led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, are not politicized, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said at an event in Riyadh today, as carried by Reuters.
OPEC+ is flexible enough to adjust its production quotas if necessary, the Saudi minister said.
After agreeing last October to cut quotas by 2 million barrels per day (bpd) from November, multiple OPEC+ producers defended the group’s decision in a wave of statements in what looked like a coordinated response to U.S. criticism of the cut. The U.S. Administration warned that there would be some consequences for Saudi Arabia for its decision together with Russia to steer OPEC+ into the oil production cut.
More recently, delegates said earlier this month that OPEC+ doesn’t plan to change its oil production targets after Russia announced a cut in its output for March.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on February 10 that Russia would cut its oil production by 500,000 bpd in March as a result of the Western sanctions and the price cap on Russian crude oil.
A week earlier, OPEC+ kept its production targets unchanged in a widely expected ‘wait-and-see’ approach to supply just ahead of the EU ban on Russian diesel and other petroleum products.
One of OPEC’s largest and most influential members, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), said earlier this month that declining oil production in many countries and the potential of insufficient crude supply would be a bigger problem for the oil market next year than how demand would evolve.
“I’m not worried about demand — what worries us is whether we are going to have enough supplies in the future,” the UAE’s Energy Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei told Bloomberg TV last week.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Based on current market fundamentals, OPEC+ judges the market to be more or less balanced.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman stressed again that OPEC+ bases its production policies purely on market fundamentals.
Dr Mamdouh G Salameh
International Oil Economist
Global Energy Expert
The formation of OPEC+ is a result of destruction of oil market with competition of shale vs traditional oil production, crashing destroying economies in 2015- 2019 or so...
Then Saudi Arabian oil minister traveled to Vienna and invited Russia to form the group we call OPEC+. OPEC of pre-2020 is dead and useless. Without Russia and other oil nations in OPEC+ OPEC is useless.