OPEC Producing Adequate Oil, President Khelil Says

(Bloomberg) — OPEC, the producer of more than 40 percent of the world’s oil, is supplying the international market with enough crude and can’t be blamed for record prices, the group’s new president, Chakib Khelil, said.

“There is enough oil in the market,” Khelil, the Algerian oil minister who took over OPEC’s rotating presidency for 2008, told reporters today in Algiers. “It’s the problems in Nigeria, in Pakistan and the credit crisis caused by the U.S. subprime- mortgage market collapse that caused prices to increase.”


He declined to say whether the 13-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries may decide to raise output to curb prices, when it meets on Feb. 1 to discuss production targets at its headquarters in Vienna. “If we see that the U.S. economy has moved into a recession, we won’t need to increase production because that will reduce demand” for oil, he said.

“OPEC seems happy with prices as they are,” said John Hall, managing director of U.K-based John Hall Associates energy consultants. “Otherwise, it would be thinking of increasing output to help the global economy and to meet rising demand from China and India.”

Bloomberg