Given all those political calculations, Mr. Kloza and other energy analysts say that Saudi Arabia is likely to cut production modestly, and lobby other producers to do the same. At current prices, Saudi Arabia, which is heavily dependent on petroleum exports, can pay its bills and most oil companies can make a profit. (The global price of oil is about $60 a barrel.)
“I think everybody is keen on stability,” said Sadad Ibrahim Al Husseini, a former executive vice president of Saudi Aramco. He expects OPEC will cut production by at least a million barrels a day, roughly 1 percent of global supply.
The energy minister of Ecuador, Carlos Pérez, said in a recent interview that he thought prices would end up in a Goldilocks range.
“Some talk of $60 oil. Other crazy people talk of $100 oil,” said Mr. Pérez, who will represent his country at the OPEC meeting next week. “But I personally think we are going to a range of between $65 and $75.”
But oil prices rarely settle at such temperate levels for long.
Any OPEC cut that raises prices would encourage more drilling in the United States and other non-OPEC countries like Brazil, potentially forcing prices back down again. And if trade tensions between the United States and China depress global growth, oil prices could slide anew.
Bernard L. Weinstein, associate director of the Maguire Energy Institute at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said it was virtually impossible to predict oil prices more than a month in advance. That is even more the case when the president is trying to jawbone energy markets and intervene in the global economy.
“We do know that after some of Trump’s tweets we have seen big drops,” Mr. Weinstein said. “Trump is the unpredictable factor, not just in terms of his tweets but what he is going to do in terms of his steel and aluminum tariffs, his hiking of tariffs on another $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. He is the disrupter in chief.”
Source : Nytimes
