Recently in Saudi Arabia 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.

OPEC ministers earlier today put aside the acrimony that had characterized their previous meeting in June and agreed to legitimize current crude output at an overall ceiling level of 30 million b/d.

The agreement doesn't include individual country quotas but it does cover the production of all 12 members, including Libya and Iraq. 

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.

Opinions may be divided on this, but to all intents and purposes, OPEC's targets are dead and gone.

The oil producer club issued a short communique after the acrimonious June 8 meeting.

The communique did not say OPEC had agreed a rollover of the 24.845 million b/d target in place since January 2009. It said that "no formal decision was reached on a production agreement."

"We are not in crisis," said OPEC secretary general Abdalla el Badri after the oil producer group's June 8 Vienna meeting broke up in disarray and Saudi Arabia said it and its fellow Gulf producers would open the taps to provide as much oil as world oil markets might need.

Badri was, in fact, referring to the world oil market which he said had adequate supply and ample stocks.

Seeing is believing. That was the first that thought came to my mind when I visited the onshore Khurais oil field in Saudi Arabia's vast desert this week.

Located some 150 km (100 miles) southeast of the capital Riyadh, the Khurais oil field began pumping 1.2 million b/d in 2009, the largest single increment from any single oilfield in the kingdom's history.

As an energy correspondent visiting from Japan, which imports 1.1 million b/d of crude from Saudi Arabia, seeing a production facility that can alone meet 30% of my country's total imports is mind boggling. The Khurais field's production capacity alone is higher than the output capacities of several oil producing countries in Asia and elsewhere.