OPEC Opts for No Limits After Marathon Meeting
Wael Mahdi Angelina Rascouet Golnar Motevalli
golnarM
OPEC abandoned all pretense this week of acting as a cartel. It’s now every member for itself.
At a chaotic meeting Friday in Vienna that was expected to last four hours but extended to nearly seven, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries tossed aside the idea of limiting production to control prices.
Instead, it went all in for the one-year-old Saudi Arabia-led policy of pumping, pumping, pumping until rivals -- external, such as Russia and U.S. shale drillers, as well as internal -- are squeezed out of market share.
“Lots of people said that OPEC was dead; OPEC itself just confirmed it,” Jamie Webster, a Washington-based oil analyst for IHS Inc., said in Vienna.
OPEC has set a production target almost without interruption since 1982, though member countries often ignored it and pumped well above it. The ceiling of 30 million barrels a day, in place since 2011 and now abandoned as too rigid, is no exception. OPEC output has outstripped it for 18 consecutive months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Now the organization says it will keep pumping as much as it does now -- about 31.5 million barrels a day -- effectively endorsing limitless output.
The oversupply has sent the price of Brent, a global oil benchmark, to a six-year low, triggering the worst slump in the energy sector since the 2008 world financial crisis. It’s cut the profits of major oil companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP Plc in half while crude-rich countries such as Mexico and Russia have watched their currencies plunge and their coffers shrink.
more:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-04/opec-unity-shattered-as-saudi-led-policy-leads-to-no-limits-ihs9xu51
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