MUSCAT /Oman/, January 21. /TASS/. The OPEC+ international monitoring commission says the earlier decision to extend the production cut deal for the current year should remain unchanged, Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters on Sunday.
"The key conclusion of the meeting is we confirm once again the agreements, reached on November 29-30, for the current year," he said.
The reason for that is the market has not regulated yet the balance between oil's demand and supply.
Russia is optimistic about the deal’s fulfilment in 2017, as the obligations were observed by 107%, he continued. The average oil price in 2017 grew by 30% year-on-year, he added.
According to Russia’s Energy Ministry, in 2017 the demand for oil grew by 1.5 million barrels a day, which was more than experts had forecasted.
OPEC and non-OPEC ministers monitoring performance of the OPEC+ oil production capping deal met in Oman on Sunday for the first monitoring committee meeting in 2018.
OPEC member-states and non-OPEC oil producing countries reached the agreement on reduction of oil production [the OPEC+ agreement] in late 2016. The agreement obliges the parties to cut production by a total of 1.8 million barrels per day in comparison with the level of October 2016. Under the agreement, Saudi Arabia and Russia have the biggest cutbacks, which are 486,000 barrels per day and 300,000 barrels per day respectively.
The deal was initially valid in the first half of 2017 but since then it was extended twice: first - until the end of March 2018, and then - until the end of 2018. The goal is to remove surplus world oil reserves from the market. According to OPEC, oil surplus inventories were managed to be reduced to 220 mln barrels by December.