Non-OPEC oil producers hampered in efforts to boost output
Apr 30, 2008
mywire.com
PARIS (AFP) — Oil producers outside the OPEC cartel are unable to pump enough oil to reduce crude prices, hampered by robust domestic demand, weak investment and exhausted oil fields, analysts say.
In the short term, "no non-OPEC member is in a position to produce more," said Francis Perrin of the publication Petrole et Gaz arabes.
"They are selling all the oil they can."
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, by contrast, has reserves equivalent to about 2.0 million barrels a day, essentially in the hands of Saudi Arabia.
While the market until recently had been expecting an output hike in non-OPEC producers, analysts are now revising downward their projections in light of disappointing performances by Mexico, Russia and Brazil, said Mike Wittner of the bank Societe Generale.
While in the long-term Kazakhstan, Brazil and Canada could boost output, "it would hardly compensate for a decline" in British and Norwegian fields in the North Sea, Perrin said.
And in the United States, he added, "the development of off-shore fields in the Gulf of Mexico will not be enough to compensate for the decline of older facilities." |
