The United Arab Emirates said it rejects a plan by other members of OPEC+ to extend the group’s agreement to curb oil production beyond April 2022, unless it’s allowed to have a higher baseline for its own cuts.
The UAE on Friday blocked an OPEC+ deal that cartel leaders Russia and Saudi Arabia had hashed out to increase supply, demanding better terms for itself. After two days of talks, and with the UAE the only holdout, ministers halted negotiations until Monday, leaving markets in limbo as oil continued its surge above $75 a barrel.
The UAE said it agreed that the 23-nation group should raise output by 400,000 barrels a day each month from August, but that the idea of extending the OPEC+ supply agreement – reached in early 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic – should be treated separately.
“The UAE is for an unconditional increase of production, which the market requires,” Energy Minister Suhail Al-Mazrouei told Bloomberg Television on Sunday. Yet the decision to extend the deal until the end of 2022 is “unnecessary to take now. We still have eight to nine months in this agreement, and we’re talking about plenty of time for this to be discussed at a later stage”.
Under the 2020 agreement, the UAE has a baseline production figure of 3.2 million barrels a day.
“That’s totally unfair and unsustainable” given the country now has the ability to pump well above that, Al-Mazrouei said.
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