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‘Gas OPEC’ Reported to Be a Back-Burner Issue
Discussions by the world’s leading natural gas exporters to form a “gas OPEC” lost momentum this week as some major producers disassociated themselves from the idea at a conference in Madrid, Dow Jones Newswires reported Wednesday.
“To begin with, I think putting the word ‘gas OPEC’ [referring to a gas version of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries] was a mistake,” said Iranian Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari at the World Petroleum Congress, according to the news service.
“It was not supposed to be any organization of that sort. It was supposed to be a forum for different exporting countries to cooperate.”
Russian Deputy Energy Minister Anatoly Yanovsky echoed that sentiment Tuesday. “We don’t want to speak about a cartel organization that would set prices with gas quotas. Absolutely not,” Dow Jones reported him as saying.
The move to form an OPEC-like group for natural gas grabbed headlines last year (see Daily GPI, Feb. 15, 2007). The U.S. House of Representatives last July passed a nonbinding resolution opposing efforts by major gas-exporting countries to form a cartel or other mechanism to influence the supply of gas and its price to the world market (see Daily GPI, July 13, 2007).
The House action came just months after a group of major gas producers met in Doha, Qatar, to lay the groundwork for a potential world gas cartel (see Daily GPI, April 10, 2007). At the April 2007 meeting the 14 members of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum set up a commission to assess the feasibility of establishing an exporters’ group for natural gas.
The forum was founded in 2001 to unite the countries that together control more than 70% of the world’s natural gas reserves. Some of the major gas-producing countries that are members of the forum include Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Qatar, Algeria, Malaysia, Norway, Nigeria, Oman, Turkmenistan, Brunei and Indonesia.
Energy experts doubt that a cartel-like organization for gas, even if formed, would have the same clout as OPEC. Daniel Yergin of Cambridge Energy Research Associates told a House committee in 2007 that he didn’t believe a gas cartel-like organization, if formed, could control the international gas market in the same way OPEC has influenced global crude oil prices and supplies.
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