IEA: Oil Price Collapse Could Leave 50 Million Jobless

The historic oil price crash from last month could lead to as many as 50 million job losses globally in the oil refining and retail industry, Reuters quoted the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) as saying on Friday.

The oil price collapse is bad for consumers, too, IEA’s Executive Director Fatih Birol said.  

Also on Friday, Birol said that he had held a call with Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, during which the two “shared our concerns over the situation in global oil markets.”

“I conveyed my hope that at this critical juncture, Saudi Arabia can once again play a stabilising role, via its G20 Presidency,” Birol tweeted on Friday, a day after Saudi Arabia called for an emergency meeting of OPEC+ producers and an additional group of producers to seek solutions to the price crash and the growing global glut.

The video meeting is set for Monday, April 6, and the U.S. oil regulator is also expected to be invited to the talks, which will reportedly include discussion of a massive global production cut of 10 million bpd.

Earlier this week, the IEA said that the world has seen some oil shocks before, but “none has hit the industry with quite the ferocity we are witnessing today.”

“The impacts will be felt throughout oil’s global supply chains and ripple into other parts of the energy sector,” the IEA said on Wednesday. According to the Paris-based agency, some production will grind to a halt, investment cuts will hit the industry, refiners will also come under immense pressure, and there will be a considerable strain in some oil-exporting nations. In addition, the price collapse and the demand collapse will impact the broader energy sector, the global economy, and trade. 

 “Comparisons with previous periods of disruption in oil markets are inevitable but misplaced. The oil industry has never seen anything like 2020,” the IEA said this week.  

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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