The US wants to create something like a cartel by teaming up with major oil-consuming countries, Toshihiro Sugiura, a researcher at the Economic Research Institute for Northern Asia (ERINA) in Japan told Russian media.
He explained that this explains the request for cooperation in freeing up part of the oil reserves to the traditional allies – Korea and Japan, and China.
“In this sense, their cooperation is rational. The US wants to create something like a cartel of oil-consuming countries by joining with large consumers.” he said.
However, according to him, this might be problematic from the point of view of US laws. Therefore, they cannot lead such a cartel. “They want, by first opening their state oil reserves, to ask other oil-consuming countries for cooperation, and thus, legally not creating a union, put them in the same boat,” the scientist said.
He positively assessed the OPEC + decision to increase oil production, believing that a different decision would facilitate the inflow of speculative capital to the market.
“I believe that OPEC + should have decided to increase production. The US should increase the production of shale oil. Then the oil price will gently drop to $60 per barrel and stabilize. In the short term, high oil prices benefit oil-producing countries. Exporting countries exist because there are consumer countries,” Sugiura said.
The OPEC+ alliance, however, has decided not to change its strategy for now due to the new COVID strain. The alliance on Thursday confirmed its intention to continue to increase oil production in January by the planned 400,000 barrels per day.
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