VIENNA — Some Middle East oil power brokers, led by Saudi Arabia, are quietly pressing ahead with a plan for OPEC to boost output, even as rifts erupted over oil demand and the state of the global economy at the group’s most uncertain meeting in years.
Key officials of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, most notably Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ali Naimi, stayed unusually silent ahead of today’s meeting, a sign that a solid consensus hadn’t been reached Tuesday amid a complex political and economic environment.
United Arab Emirates oil minister Mohammad Al-Hamli said today’s relatively well-supplied oil market will give way to a much more supply-constrained market.
“You need to really look beyond the second quarter,” Hamli said. The market “is going to be tight.” Wall Street Journal
