Faced with fears of recession, the OPEC + countries which meet on Monday should be satisfied with a modest increase in their production targets, some experts even evoking a reduction to support prices.
The thirteen members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), led by Saudi Arabia, and their ten partners led by Russia meet to adjust the quotas for the month of October.
Scheduled by videoconference, the meeting should begin at 11:00 a.m. GMT (1:00 p.m. in Vienna, headquarters of the cartel).
Far from their peaks at levels close to 140 dollars a barrel, the prices of Brent from the North Sea and American WTI, the two world crude benchmarks, suffered their third consecutive monthly decline in August, once morest a backdrop of economic prospects. ever darker worlds.
Enough to fuel speculation: “It is not entirely certain that OPEC will agree to a further increase in quotas of 100,000 barrels per day”, as in September, Caroline Bain, of Capital Economics, explains to AFP.
“In light of the recent drop in oil prices (…), we do not rule out unchanged production, or even a reduction,” she continues.
Saudi Energy Minister Abdelaziz bin Salman seemed to open the door ten days ago to this hypothesis, which has since received the support of several member countries and the alliance’s Joint Technical Committee. He spoke of a market “falling into a vicious circle of low liquidity and extreme volatility”.
– Iran: dashed hopes –
Over the course of its monthly meetings, OPEC+ is resisting calls from Westerners to open its floodgates more widely in order to contain the surge in prices.
“The group clearly wants to maintain the high prices” which provide it with lucrative revenue, said Craig Erlam, analyst at Oanda.
In addition, “there may be concerns that the return of Iranian crude to the market will tip the balance of the market in favor of supply and therefore lower prices,” he adds.
For Matthew Holland of Energy Aspects, the question of a decline in the group’s production, which would be the first since the drastic cuts made to cope with the collapse in demand during the outbreak of the Covid pandemic -19, will rather arise at the next meeting, in October.
Everything will depend on the progress or not of the negotiations on Iranian nuclear power.
Hopes of an agreement, which would be accompanied by an easing of American sanctions, in particular on oil, have recently been revived.
Before a new cold shower in these interminable talks: the United States estimated Thursday that Tehran’s response to the text submitted by the European Union was “unfortunately (…) not constructive”.
– Message to the West –
Amena Bakr, of the firm Energy Intelligence, calls however not to overinterpret the words of the Saudi Minister of Energy, who only “emphasized that volatility is bad for the market”.
For the expert, this is a message “to all Western governments who have intervened in the market” since the start of the war in Ukraine, she explains.
Latest announcement to date, the seven most industrialized countries decided on Friday to “urgently” cap the price of Russian oil, in order to limit the resources that Moscow derives from the sale of hydrocarbons.
But Russia has warned that it will no longer sell oil to countries adopting this unprecedented mechanism.
The supply on the market might then be reduced, which might contribute to a new surge in prices which, despite the recent decline, remain historically high and extremely volatile.