“The meeting with Saudi Arabia, as well as with the Iranians will be held in November”, Novak said, adding that consultations continue.
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That’s the view of the outspoken former central bank governor of Nigeria, a fellow member of OPEC and the cartel’s biggest producer in Africa. This is likely to complicate further a dialogue between Moscow and the OPEC exporters’ group on tackling the global oil glut, with joint production cuts already looking elusive.
“Doubtless, we (will) speak a lot about the current market situation and the prices and about our projections, but we (will) also talk about output supply and demand”. In July, Finance Minister Siluanov said that Russian Federation would spend up to 3 trillion rubles ($54 billion) from the country’s Reserve Fund. Saudi is running annual fiscal deficits of $146bn. Both economies still have the breathing space to make changes, although the stirring the boat now will take four years to change national economic direction.
“I am not sure it benefits Saudi Arabia itself”.
He also said that production costs for Russian oil companies are the lowest in the world – $4 per barrel.
It has certainly hurt Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, which pumps about 1.9 million barrels a day. Russian Federation and Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of OPEC, have met recently to discuss oil prices and plans are afoot to “bring together OPEC and non-OPEC countries” in October, Novak said. After winning office in March, he has vowed to root out corruption in the notoriously murky sector. Trading sources told Reuters that majors such as Exxon, Shell, Total and Eni have been all buying more Saudi oil for their refineries in Western Europe and the Mediterranean in the past few months at the expense of Russian oil.
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Rosneft (OTC:RNFTF) CEO Igor Sechin says Russia’s crude oil production could drop by 25M-30M tons in each of the next three years if the government pushes through plans to increase taxes on the industry to plug holes in the federal budget.
