OpeOluwani Akintayo
26 June 2018, Sweetcrude, Lagos — The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC will take the oil cuts agreement into 2019, Russia’s energy minister, Alexander Novak has said.
In a live interview with CNBC, Novak said a new agreement will be signed at the end of this year.
“We are planning to sign a new agreement by the end of this year,” Alexander Novak said at the OPEC summit in Vienna.
“The conceptual framework of that agreement was shared with all the participants of today’s ministerial meeting so that they could study it and make any amendments.”
OPEC, Russia, and others involved in the Declaration of Agreement, DoC, had on Saturday, agreed to raise oil output by a total of one million barrels per day (bpd) in order to balance supply and demand in the second half of the year.
The deal expires at the end of 2018, but Novak said that an additional proposal was already being planned.
“This agreement will, to a large part, be based on the monitoring of the market situation, on the creation and institutionalization of the governing body and the ability to take measures, if necessary, as was done in 2016,” he said.
The draft agreement would be considered again at the next meeting of the monitoring committee in September, Novak added, “with the view to signing it at the ministerial meeting at the end of the year.”
The minister said that this weekend’s deal to raise oil output by one million bp “should be sufficient,” despite Russia originally arguing that a 1.5 million barrel hike should be implemented.
“We are not yet concerned in any way by this decision because the mechanism we have is quite flexible and allows us to take different decisions in the future,” he added.
As part of Saturday’s deal, Russia plans to increase its output by 200,000 bpd.