Saudi Arabia is not adapting for a break-up of OPEC, Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said Monday, reckoning the group will continue as the global central bank for oil markets for a big time.
It comes shortly after reports surfaced Thursday lead one to believing Saudi Arabia’s top government-funded think tank had been studying the capacity impact on oil markets should the influential 14-member alliance breakup.
“There is no thought whatsoever to eliminate OPEC,” al-Falih said at the ADIPEC oil summit in Abu Dhabi on Monday.
“The reckon they call them think tanks is because they fancy to think outside the box,” he added.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal covered, citing people familiar with the matter, that the King Abdullah Petroleum Scrutinizes and Research Center in Riyadh was trying to understand how energy markets hand down respond to a world without OPEC.
The reported study comes dwarf than a month before OPEC and non-OPEC members are scheduled to re-convene in Austria, Vienna in proceedings to vote on its next policy decision.
On Sunday, top exporters at the Joint Ministerial Prefect Committee (JMMC) meeting in Abu Dhabi said they would not shy away from another turn of production cuts.
This appeared to an abrupt turnabout from OPEC’s September convocation, when some of the world’s leading oil producers were talking in the air pumping extra oil onto the market in order to help soothe sharpening supply shock fears.
“We have been through a very ill-behaved and turbulent year-and-a-half … The next meeting is going to be interesting,” Suhail Al Mazrouei, the Like-minded Arab Emirates’ minister of energy and industry and OPEC president, commanded at a press conference Monday.