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Madrid: As supply fears helped set a new price record, Saudi Arabia's oil minister said yesterday that it had no immediate plans to boost crude output because there was no need to do so.
But Ali Al Naimi said he was "concerned about the [price] level" and suggested Saudi Arabia was ready to boost production if the kingdom perceived that basics had changed with supply no longer meeting demand.
For now, "all our buyers are satisfied and happy," he told reporters on the fringes of the 19th World Petroleum Congress and against a backdrop of soaring oil prices that hit a trading record above $146 a barrel.
But he suggested it was ready to put more oil on the market "if there is a buyer". About 20 energy ministers, CEOs of national and international oil companies and other industry leaders are among the more than 3,000 delegates attending the congress, which is debating ways of cooling the volatility of energy markets.
In the past, production boosts have been effective in driving prices down, but the buoyancy of the present market appears to be defying conventional control mechanisms.
A recent Saudi pledge to add 200,000 barrels per day as of July to a 300,000-barrel per day production increase announced in May did not dent prices, which have continued to spike to new records with increasing frequency.
Concern
Concern over an unexpectedly large fall in crude stocks in the US - the world's largest oil consumer - appeared to be part of the mix driving prices.
The US Energy Department's Energy Information Administration (EIA) said on Wednesday that oil supplies fell by two million barrels last week, or about 800,000 barrels more than analysts surveyed by the energy research firm Platts had predicted.
The development appears to add support to arguments from the US and other major consumers that the market is undersupplied - something the Saudis and the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) as a whole denies.
Yesterday, Naimi warned against attaching undue importance to the EIA's weekly snapshot.
"Don't take one week's number and use it as a guideline," he said, adding that crude stocks rose by 20 million barrels last month in the 30 industrialised countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). "Whatever we are seeing in the international oil market is driven by many factors, the least of which is the concern over the immediate supply."
Instead, he listed increased institutional investment, the weak dollar, Middle East tensions, concerns about natural catastrophes and "the fear the world is running out of fossil fuels" as boosting prices.
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