Recently in Middle East Category

By Margaret McQuaile and Kate Dourian

Who will be OPEC's next secretary general after Abdalla el-Badri, who will finish his second three-year term in the job at the end of this year? OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia has nominated its former OPEC governor Majid Moneef but it's unlikely that he will be the only candidate.

You might think that choosing a secretary general to run the Vienna secretariat would be a fairly simple affair. But it's not. Politics and geopolitics tend to spill over from crude output policy into the process of filling the group's top job.

(John Roberts was a guest lecturer on energy security at the NATO Partnership for Peace Symposium at Oberammergau earlier this month.)

When NATO looks at Iran it would seem reasonable to expect that it was looking at how the western world's warships are cramming into the Strait of Hormuz amidst charge and counter-charge that the strait faces the prospect of an Iranian blockade.

But when NATO invites its partners in the region -- countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, Jordan and Egypt are all members of NATO's Partnership for Peace program -- for an informal symposium on issues of mutual interest, it's not just energy security that's up for discussion, but cyber security, water and the problems posed by declining military budgets.

Our top 10 survey this year had 37 news stories suggested as candidates for the biggest events of the year in the oil business.

There's certainly not a lot of consensus out there: 24 of those 37 stories got 1st place votes. We've never had a distribution like that in the five years we've been running this survey. Unlike last year, when Macondo stood out among all the events of 2010, or 2008, when the march to almost $150 crude and its subsequent post-Lehman Brothers collapse dominated the news, 2011 had a lot of things going on. But it didn't have that one signature story that everyone talked about, which is kind of surprising when you think about it.

Saudi Arabia is synonymous with oil. But as Platts' Dubai editor Tamsin Carlise writes in this week's "At the Wellhead" column in Platts Oilgram News, the company's signature achievement this year will be its contribution to the natural gas boom that is going on worldwide.

When the top management of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) issued instructions to its operating subsidiaries to cut costs by 20%, it was a wake-up call for the units' general managers, who were not used to dealing with budget constraints.

One of the most important stories in the last week, but one which didn't get much publicity, was in the October 8 Wall Street Journal. (Here's the link to it, but it's behind a paywall.)

The story somehow managed to be utterly predictable and shocking at the same time. Utterly predictable because it said what almost everybody sort of knew as the Libyan rebels took control of that country: that the unity showed in overthrowing Moammar Khadafy was very likely to dissolve into tribal and regional divisions once the common enemy was vanquished. But it was shocking also because most of the noise coming out of Libya's oil sector has so far been positive about the return of production. 

Todd Kozel, the Executive Chairman and CEO of Gulf Keystone Petroleum, says the Kurdistan focused independent is not for sale.

Don't believe a word of it. Every junior resources company is for sale at a price, especially those that are publicly traded, have not yet booked reserves and have no established revenue stream.