Recently in OPEC 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.

Another week has gone by with relatively little movement in the headline price of oil, but don't let that fool you into thinking the market is calm. It just doesn't know whether to focus on the never-ending gloomy economic news from Europe or take its cue from the increasing fundamental tightness in the market and the risk of supply interruptions arising from the increasingly heated standoff between Iran and major Western powers.

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. 

Overshadowed on a day when oil prices were spooked by reports of Iran planning war games in the key Strait of Hormuz, the International Energy Agency and OPEC both offered up apparently bearish oil market outlooks today.

As next week's OPEC meeting draws closer, all indications are that ministers will leave crude output pretty much unchanged. But what does "unchanged" mean exactly?

With oil prices hovering at or above $100/barrel, there is no great pressure on the oil producer club to do anything drastic for the time being.

Indonesia used to be a major exporter of oil. It hasn't been in that position for more than five years, and its decline in production has resisted efforts to be reversed. But have those efforts been adequate? In this week's Oilgram News column "Petrodollars," Platts' Meghan Gordon -- normally based in Washington, but who recently spent a month in Asia -- discusses what might be needed for significant change.

The timing and scale of the restart of Libya's oil sector after this year's civil war is one of the key factors likely to influence oil prices in the coming months, and the International Energy Agency thinks production is picking up more quickly than people had been anticipated.

"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" was how the great English poet John Keats described autumn. But for OPEC, the next few months may turn out to be just a season of mists without the fruitfulness.

Casting a particularly gloomy veil over world oil markets is the outlook for the world economy. Earlier this week, the International Monetary Fund declared that the global economy was in "a dangerous new phase," with the risks "clearly to the downside."