Oil market is well supplied: Al Falih
moscow — The global oil market is well supplied and Saudi Arabia has successfully met additional demand, Saudi Energy Minister Khalid Al Falih said on Wednesday.
He was speaking to reporters in Moscow, where he attended an energy conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other influential energy officials. Falih said Saudi Arabia had raised its oil output to 10.7 million barrels per day (bpd) in October so far to meet rising demand for oil.
“We see the market is being well supplied,” Falih said.
The current output is just shy of the record set in November 2016, before the kingdom and allies including Russia agreed to cut production to boost prices.
“We’re meeting every single demand for barrels,” Al Falih said. “We’ve increased production quite significantly. We just have to be responsive to demand” because some would say the market is currently oversupplied, he said.
In response to a question about surging oil prices, which reached a four-year high above $85 a barrel, Al Falih said the current price “was not based on fiscal flows of supply and demand”. “This is created in financial markets,” he said.
Russia could raise oil production by 200,000-300,000 barrels per day to tackle possible shortages of the fuel, President Vladimir Putin said. Putin also said that his US counterpart Donald Trump was right that the current oil price was too high.
“President Trump considers that the price is high; he’s partly right, but let’s be honest,” Putin said at the Russian Energy Week conference in Moscow. “Donald, if you want to find the culprit for the rise in prices, you need to look in the mirror.”