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OPEC+ Mulls Downgrading Next Week’s Meet to Monitoring Session

OPEC+ Mulls Downgrading Next Week’s Meet to Monitoring Session

OPEC and its allies are discussing downgrading next week’s full-scale ministerial meeting, delegates said, a signal the coalition may stick with plans to gradually revive oil production.

The OPEC+ coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Russia may go ahead with just the meeting of its monitoring committee on April 28, rather than the full gathering that’s currently also planned for that day, the delegates said.

The talks are continuing and nothing has been decided yet, they added, asking not to be named because the discussions are private.

The Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee was established to make recommendations for the full ministerial group, rather than set or change policy. Holding the JMMC meeting alone may indicate members don’t see much need to revise the current strategy.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies already agreed at the start of this month to carefully restore some halted production between May and July. The alliance will revive just over 2 million daily barrels of the 8 million they’ve been keeping offline to shore up global markets.

Three OPEC+ delegates, speaking anonymously, said they don’t expect any changes to the scheduled supply increase at next week’s gathering.

Saudi Arabia, the group’s most influential member, has said it’s comfortable with the strategy. The kingdom’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said on April 15 that he doesn’t “see anything yet that disturbs us, me or my colleagues at OPEC+.”

Global markets are also signaling that OPEC+ is following the right course, restoring just enough supply to meet the fragile recovery in demand. Brent crude futures, the international benchmark, traded near $67 a barrel on Monday -- close to their highest level in a month.

OPEC+’s output restraint, combined with the tentative demand rebound, has cleared the vast majority of the oil-inventory glut that piled up when consumption collapsed during the pandemic. Storage tanks in developed economies now hold barely a fifth of the excess that amassed in the middle of last year, according to the International Energy Agency.

OPEC+ Mulls Downgrading Next Week’s Meet to Monitoring Session

With many OPEC+ members currently celebrating the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, holding a session of the JMMC rather than a full-blown ministerial conference may be easier, some of the delegates said.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.