Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that Moscow and Washington could work together to calm the tensions in the oil market that has roiled the industry in recent years, CNBC informed.
Russia has partnered with OPEC and other producer nations since 2017 to manage nearly half of the world’s oil supply. The countries took action after crude prices sank to 12-year lows in 2016, piling pressure on oil-dependent economies and bankrupting hundreds of U.S. energy companies.
The United States, where drillers compete in a free market, is not part of the deal. U.S. laws prohibit companies from colluding to fix prices, and a bipartisan group of U.S. Congress members recently revived a push to punish OPEC for alleged price-fixing.
Still, Putin suggested that some form of working together is possible during a press conference with U.S. President Donald Trump in Helskinki on Monday.
“I think that we as a major oil and gas power, and the United States as a major oil and gas power as well, we could work together on regulation of international markets, because neither of us is actually interested in the plummeting of the prices,” Putin stated.
“But nor are we interested in driving prices up because it will drain a lot of juices from all other sectors of the economy, so we do have space for cooperation here,” he stated.
Trump has demanded that OPEC tame fuel costs, after a slow-and-steady rally accelerated this year. Led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, the two dozen producer nations last month agreed to hike output to offset falling output in Venezuela and looming U.S. sanctions on Iran, the world’s fifth largest oil producer.
Consumers around the world, as well as U.S. shale producers, suffer from price swings, Putin said.
Those shale drillers have used new technologies like hydraulic fracturing to push U.S. oil and gas production to all-time highs. That United States is already the world’s biggest natural gas producer and is now poised to top Russia as the global leader in oil output.
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