Oil Hits 50 Dollars As OPEC Suggests It Might Deepen Output Cuts
Should OPEC members find that the oil market needs more cuts, the cartel could decide to lower production by one percent more than last week’s deal-to-make-a-deal, Algerian Energy Minister Nouredine Bouterfa has said to local Ennahar TV.ut in November.
Algeria hosted last week a meeting of the OPEC producers, which, against most odds and expectations, managed to reach a deal, to make a deal to cut production in the future by some 700,000 barrels per day to a production band of between 32.5 million bpd and 33 million bpd.
“We will evaluate the market in Vienna by the end of November and if 700,000 barrels are not enough, we will go up. Now that OPEC is unified and speaks in one voice everything is much easier and if we need to cut by 1 percent, we will cut by 1 percent,” Bouterfa told Ennahar, as reported by Reuters.
Ennahar TV tweeted on Thursday that Bouterfa had also said that OPEC and non-OPEC producers would meet in Istanbul on October 8-13.
On Wednesday, Venezuela’s oil ministry website confirmed that Venezuelan oil minister Eulogio Del Pino would attend the Istanbul meeting, alongside ministers from OPEC partners Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Gabon, Qatar and the UAE, plus non-OPEC Russia. The ministers will discuss how to implement the production cut agreed upon last week and how to advance talks to include non-OPEC producers, Del Pino says.
At the meeting in Algiers, OPEC agreed in principal on a range of production limits, with details on who’s cutting how much to be decided at the OPEC November 30 meeting in Vienna. In general, Libya and Nigeria – that have seen a lot of civil unrest and violence affecting oil output in recent months – will be exempted from production cuts, as will Iran. However, with Libya’s upcoming additional output, and OPEC’s track record of not sticking firmly to its decisions, the market is still guessing whether a specific deal will be hammered out in November.
Source: Oil Price
