Mexico oil ministers' meet to focus on 1999-Tellez
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Thursday September 24, 3:40 pm Eastern Time
MEXICO CITY, Sept 24 (Reuters) - Mexico's oil minister, Luis Tellez, said on Thursday that a meeting next week with his Venezuelan and Saudi Arabian counterparts would focus on policy for next year, amid signs that their production-cutting initiatives are working.
Tellez told Mexico's chamber of deputies that the Saudi Arabian oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, had found good compliance on a recent assessment tour of oil producing countries in the Persian Gulf.
''The Saudi Arabian minister just made a visit through all of the exporting countries of the Persian Gulf and it was very good. And that is precisely what we are going to analyse,'' said Tellez.
''We are going to analyse the perspective for next year and analyse what will be the policy and follow-through of the three oil producing countries that led the Riyadh agreement,'' he added.
Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, together with non-OPEC member Mexico, led two rounds of talks this year which ultimately led to pledges by OPEC and non-OPEC to cut a total of 2.5 million barrels per day from world production to combat a drop in oil prices of more than 40 percent since last October.
Compliance with the cuts in the first round -- sparked by a deal in Riyadh between the three leading countries -- from April through June was reckoned by independent observers to be around 75 percent, but that has since climbed to around 90 percent for the round starting in July.
Tellez said Saudi Arabia was complying fully, while Venezuela was still about 10 percent shy of its 550,000 bpd pledge as it worked out ''technical'' details, presumably contract obligations referred to previously by Venezuelan officials. Tellez added, however, that countries such as Nigeria and Indonesia are not honoring their commitments because of internal political and financial turmoil.
Nevertheless, Tellez noted that the oil market had improved recently and said Mexico's average price for its basket of crude oil exports on Wednesday was $11.63 per barrel, compared with $10.50 per barrel in the first six months of the year. That still means oil revenue will fall far below the budgeted $11.50 per barrel for the whole year unless there is a dramatic improvement over the next few months.
The three ministers are to meet on October 2 at a destination in Mexico yet to be decided. |
