OPEC: Oil Price Will Not Go to $20 or $25

by Ship & Bunker News Team
Monday January 26, 2015

OPEC Secretary General Abdalla El-Badri says he does believe the oil price will dip as low as $20 per barrel, and is more likely to slowly recover, Bloomberg reports.

"The price will not go to $20 or $25, I think the price will stay at where we are now," he said in an interview with Bloomberg on the sidelines of the Davos World Economic Forum.

"We have seen this before - prices coming down very fast and go up very slow.

"But prices will rebound."

According to the report, the OPEC chief said prices should not fall further because the current low oil prices themselves are not warranted by global supply and demand.

El-Badri said that non-OPEC producers should expect to roll back supply first, since OPEC output had remained largely stable in the past decade while non-OPEC output had steadily increased.

But Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Rowsch Nuri Shaways said his country, OPEC's second largest member after Saudi Arabia, would have no choice but to raise output to protect the nation's revenues at current prices.

"Because of the new challenges, especially the price of oil, Iraq has to try its best to raise it oil production and exports," he said.

Separately last week El-Badri said OPEC's decision to maintain supply levels were purely economic while Saudi Aramco's CEO blamed "geopolitics" for having pushed oil prices too high in the first place.

Ship & Bunker News Team
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