The ministerial monitoring committee of OPEC+ agreement member countries will meet Wednesday via videoconference to assess the current oil market situation and discuss the future oil production plan.
This time there will only be a ministerial monitoring meeting of the alliance, which includes 8 of the 23 countries participating in the OPEC+ agreement. These are Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Venezuela and Kazakhstan. A general ministerial meeting has so far been scheduled for June 4, 2023. However, the monitoring committee can request a general OPEC+ meeting at any time if necessary.
The OPEC+ monitoring committee will meet to issue a recommendation on a future oil production plan. A source told TASS that the committee will most likely recommend sticking to the current quotas. Since November 2022, the OPEC+ countries were to reduce production by 2 million barrels per day (bpd) from the August level. In addition, as noted by the TASS interlocutor, the monitoring committee will assess the current situation in the oil market.
The key factors now affecting the state of the world oil market are the recovery of Chinese economy after the coronavirus restrictions and the EU embargo on Russian oil and oil products. During interviews at the World Economic Forum in Davos, OPEC Secretary-General Haitham al-Ghais noted that it was too early to talk about the impact of sanctions on oil from Russia. At the same time, the OPEC secretary-general was "cautiously optimistic" about China, predicting an increase in demand for oil in this country by 500 thousand bpd in 2023. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the US Department of Energy in its January forecast estimated an increase in oil demand in China at 530,000 bpd. And the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated it at almost half of the total growth in global oil demand, which the agency forecasts at 1.9 million bpd in 2023.
The meeting of the OPEC+ ministerial monitoring committee is scheduled for 16:00 Moscow time. The committee's work is administered by Russia and Saudi Arabia - the largest by volume of production participants of the agreement.
Usually, on the eve of the ministerial meeting of the OPEC+ countries, the alliance technical committee holds its meeting to assess various oil market development scenarios. The report of the technical committee is a basis for assessment of the situation at the meeting of the ministerial monitoring committee. The meeting of the technical panel was scheduled for January 31, but was cancelled, according to a source in one of the delegations, TASS reported. The source did not specify the reason for cancelling the meeting.
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Based on materials from TASS