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OPEC Secretariat confirms OPEC+ ministerial meeting will be held on Sunday afternoon

The meeting will be held as a video conference

MOSCOW, July 17. /TASS/. The OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting, which was called off in early July, will take place on Sunday, July 18, at 13.00 Moscow time, according to an OPEC statement.

The meeting will be held as a video conference.

Thus, the OPEC Secretariat confirmed the information of TASS’ sources that the agreements within the alliance made it possible to convene the meeting on July 18. According to them, the main issues have been settled between the allies.

The sources told TASS that the disagreements had been settled between Saudi Arabia and the UAE. They also say that the coming OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting will touch upon the levels of oil production by the end of 2021, as well as the prolongation of the OPEC+ deal until the end of 2022.

Dispute

In early July, the OPEC+ ministers could not come to an agreement on these two issues for five days. The UAE was unhappy that the deal to reduce oil production was supposed to be extended beyond April 2022, when it expires, on the same terms as are currently in effect. The Emirates’ Energy Ministry believes that the baseline - the level from which the production quotas are calculated — is not relevant for them and does not take into account the actual production capacity. Saudi Arabia rejected the possibility of adjusting the parameter individually.

Due to disagreements about the baseline, the ministers were unable to agree on a more pressing issue of oil production levels from this August until the end of 2021. Initially, all OPEC+ members had approved to gradually relax oil production by 2mln bpd until the end of this year, as the market is experiencing shortages. Nevertheless, it became impossible to vote on a further easing of production quotas due to disagreements on the first issue.