The fractures within OPEC’s precarioua production cut agreement are becoming increasingly more visible.
Following last weekend’s report that OPEC will invite Nigeria and Libya – two cartel member states whose output was not capped as part of the Vienna agreement – moments ago Nigeria’s oil minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu has politely declined such an overture, saying that his country will “miss” the ministerial meeting in Russia on July 24, adding that it will eventually find the time to meet Saudi and Russian oil ministers (just not now), and that his country has no set timeframe to join OPEC oil production cuts.
“Hopefully in the next two to three months we can see how predictable the production return has been and then can say we feel stabilized and need to make the corresponding cuts,” Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu told reporters cited by Reuters.
And while Kachikwu said that Nigeria will support a cap on its production, this won’t happen for a while: he said that while his country is currently producing 1.7mmbpd of crude, it will (maybe?) impose a cap only when it can stably pump 1.8 million barrels per day. He also said that he will hopefully know in “two to three months” whether oil output has stabilized before agreeing on production cuts.
Faced with the prospect of even more supply output out of Nigeria, oil is once again on the back foot.
via http://ift.tt/2tNphln Tyler Durden