EMEA News
Iran's Impending Oil Export Boost No Longer a Problem: Nigeria
In a u-turn on comments he made just days ago, Nigeria's junior oil minister Friday told media at the December 4 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meeting that renewed oil exports from Iran would not exacerbate global oversupply.
Instead, Emmanuel Kachikwu now thinks the added Iranian output will accommodated by declining U.S. shale production.
In disclosing that he was no longer worried about Iran resuming oil output, Kachikwu said, "I would imagine that initial levels will be moderate.
"It will take time to scale all their production facilities; it will be moderate, but they will fit in [within OPEC] and frankly, as you see, the drop in shale production, we will all see Iran lift most of its weight and market base."
Two days earlier, on December 2, Kachikwu told Lagos reporters that his country would ask OPEC to persuade Iran to delay its planned exports.
"There is a lot of sensitivity [to] the $42/barrel oil price currently, that it has the potential to go down if Iran throws the estimated 1.5 million barrels per day of crude into the market by next year," he said last week.
"I will be meeting one-on-one with other OPEC ministers to try and see how we can at least get to delay Iran flooding the market.
"I will be talking with Iran's oil minister on that so that we can stabilize the price."
But when reporters in Vienna questioned him about this remark, Kachikwu replied, "Nigeria doesn't have such a proposal."
The US Energy Information Administration earlier this year warned that additional oil volumes from Iran "are expected to put downward pressure on global oil prices in 2016."
