Saudi Arabia: OPEC + pact would cut 10 million barrels / day

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – The proposal by OPEC and other oil countries, including Russia, to reduce production implies a cut of 10 million barrels per day until July, which would later be eight million per day until the end of the year, Saudi Arabia said on Friday although the pact was still in the air.

OPEC and the other producing nations met in a video conference that lasted into the early hours of the morning, but apparently did not close the deal after Kuwait’s oil minister said Mexico had blocked the proposal. OPEC did not reveal whether the agreement that would boost prices was closed, downward due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Saudi state broadcaster alerted on Friday the terms of the deal, which includes a cut of six million barrels a day for 16 months from 2021.

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, said on the eve that he spoke with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and with King Salman of Saudi Arabia about the negotiations.

“They are close to an agreement that encompasses OPEC and many other countries outside of OPEC, and we will see what happens,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

“There is so much production that nobody even knows what to do with it. This is how things are, ”he added.

But in the early hours of Friday, the Kuwaiti minister, Khaled al-Fadhel, suggested that the deal was not yet done.

“At the OPEC group meeting that ended at 03:00, Mexico disputed the agreement of all countries to reduce oil production by 10 million barrels a day,” al-Fadhel wrote, but offered no further details. .

Mexico did not immediately offer an official response, but its Energy Minister, Rocío Nahle, said on Twitter at almost the same time that the country proposed cutting production by 100,000 barrels a day in the next two months.

Saudi state television also quoted Saudi Emergía Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman as saying the OPEC + deal “depends” on Mexico.

The oil market was oversupplied after Russia and OPEC failed to forge a pact on production cuts in early March. According to analysts, Moscow refused to support even a moderate decline because this would have only benefited the American energy companies, which were producing at full capacity. The stalemate would harm US oil shale producers and protect market share.

Associated Press journalists Daria Litvinova and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow and Cathy Bussewitz in New York contributed to this report.