The Secretary-General of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), Jamal Al-Loughani, said Monday, that the US senators reintroducing the ‘NOPEC’ bill last month, “has new risks and will bring more ambiguity for the oil market.”
Al-Loughani told Al-Jarida, that the draft law “aims to introduce amendments to the US anti-monopoly law by canceling the sovereign immunity that protects the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the national oil companies in its member states from judicial accountability” and if approved, it will lead to the inability of supplies to significantly meet future demand in the global oil market.
He explained that the OPEC countries have not set oil prices at all since the beginning of the eighties of the last century, and all that they mainly target is to ensure the stability and balance of the global oil market.
Al-Loughani stated that OPEC, and through cooperation and coordination with some major oil-producing countries from outside it within the OPEC Plus alliance, succeeded in achieving the required stability and balance over the past years during which the global oil market was subjected to severe shocks, the latest of which was the Corona virus pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian crisis.
The senior OAPEC official stated that OPEC Plus, which includes six OAPEC member states, has shown its willingness and ability to act in a proactive manner to support the fundamentals of the global oil market when facing any developments and uncertain challenges that the oil market may face. He referred to the step taken by a number of “OPEC Plus” countries in a coordinated manner, which is to voluntarily reduce its oil production by about 1.649 million barrels per day, in addition to the agreed reduction of two million barrels per day, according to the decision taken in October 2022.
He stressed that this reduction in production is a precautionary measure in order to ensure the stability and balance of the oil market, praising its main role in the rise in crude oil prices in futures markets today by about 8 percent, which is the largest rise in one day in more than a year.
Al-Loughani stated that the supporters of the aforementioned bill claim that OPEC is seeking to set global oil prices, which has led to higher prices for consumers around the world, without heeding the high global inflation wave that prompted central banks to raise interest rates to rein in amid fears of A recession in the global economy.
He added that the supporters of the law also did not pay attention to the direct intervention in the pricing mechanisms in the oil market by each of the Group of Seven major industrialized countries, the European Union and Australia, which imposed a price ceiling on the exports of crude oil and Russian oil products transported by sea.