OPEC Meeting in early December

[dan_s]

CARACAS, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Oil ministers of OPEC nations will hold a "candid, informal" meeting on Dec. 3, a day before the group's formally scheduled encounter, Venezuela's energy minister said on Wednesday, adding the idea was suggested by Saudi Arabia.

"It's an informal meeting where we're going to speak in a very frank way about the market situation, and we're going to speak frankly about production levels in each country," Venezuelan Oil Minister Eulogio del Pino told Reuters in a phone interview.

Price-hawk Venezuela has been pushing for OPEC action to boost prices. OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia, however, has rebuffed those calls and has instead focused on defending market share.

The informal meeting will be held at the suggestion of Saudi Arabia's oil minister Ali al-Naimi's, del Pino said.

"After our calls for the need for OPEC to do something, he himself proposed that we could meet a day before the OPEC meeting to talk, in a candid, informal way, about the situation, what we're going to do with volumes, what we're going to do with prices," added del Pino, who met with Naimi earlier on Wednesday.

One source familiar with the matter confirmed the meeting, adding it was "just talks." Informal meetings of OPEC nation officials are not uncommon in the run-up to formal gatherings. Naimi was the key architect of OPEC's decision in November 2014 not to cut crude production despite a growing global glut, exacerbated by a boom in U.S. shale oil.

Venezuela, meanwhile, has been pushing for OPEC action to push up prices that have exacerbated an economic recession at home. The Dec. 3 meeting will be in Vienna, said del Pino, who is also the president of Venezuela's state-run oil company PDVSA . Del Pino added he was in charge of organizing the gathering, and that Ecuador and Qatar's ministers had already confirmed their attendance.

The 168th (Ordinary) OPEC Meeting will be held December 4, 2015 in Vienna, Austria.

Journalists and oil industry analysts are welcome to attend these events, provided that they register in advance.

http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/press_room/309.htm

[dan_s]

Algeria's former energy minister, Nordine Aït-Laoussine, says the time has come to consider suspending his country's Opec membership if the cartel is unwilling to defend oil prices and merely serves as the tool of a Saudi regime pursuing its own self-interest. "Why remain in an organisation that no longer serves any purpose?" he asked.

Read: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/econ ... nster.html

[dan_s]

OPEC Countries: When the Money Runs Out, Then What?

Read: http://www.oilandgas360.com/opec-countr ... dium=email

[grimaldi]

I find the Telegraph article really slanted, and it does not confront the idea that the Saudis are in a fight for their own survival from not only Iran but ISIS, which are funded by oil. Compared to those jihadi threats, budgets are almost as irrelevant to them as whether Venezuela goes bankrupt. They're not doing this primarily to confound American fracking, that's just collateral damage.