Rising U.S. shale-oil production isn’t a threat to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Secretary-General Abdalla El-Badri said Thursday, welcoming the increased supply.
“We’re not really concerned,” El-Badri said at a briefing in Vienna, a day after OPEC agreed to leave its crude output quota unchanged. “We welcome any additional supply. ... It’s fine with us. It’s another source of energy and the world really needs this oil. I don’t see it as a threat to OPEC” he said.
Shale-oil production has risen with the introduction of new technology known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to tap underground rock formations. Production of socalled tight oil is currently at 1 million barrels a day. It willdouble in 2020 and rise to 3 million barrels by 2035, according to El-Badri.
“I don’t see that big a quantity,” said El-Badri, whose term as secretary-general was extended Wednesday by one year, until the end of 2013.
U.S. average daily output will climb 14 percent this year, the most in six decades, according to the Energy Department, as Anadarko Petroleum Corp. and Chesapeake Energy Corp. exploit new deposits from North Dakota to Texas. The nation is on track to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest oil producer in 2020, the International Energy Agency said last month.
“I don’t know if the U.S. will be independent as they say,” he said. “I hope they will, but I don’t really see it.”
El-Badri echoed comments made Wednesday by Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, who said he wasn’t concerned by the burgeoning U.S. production from shale deposits. However, the United Arab Emirates is “very concerned,” according to Oil Minister Mohamed al-Hamli.
El-Badri also said that figures supplied by Iran show it producing around 3.7 million barrels a day. That is the same amount Tehran pumped before international embargoes on its crude - stemming from concerns Tehran may be seeking nuclear arms - that took effect this year and are estimated to have cost it hundreds of thousands of barrels a day in sales. His comments on Iranian production indicated that figures from other organizations may be off or that Tehran’s statistics might be inaccurate.
The International Energy Agency, which offers energy expertise to industrialized countries, said last month that Iranian oil output was at a daily2.7 million barrels in October.
OPEC’s members are Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.
Information for this article was contributed by Nidaa Bakhsh of Bloomberg News and George Jahn of The Associated Press.
Business, Pages 22 on 12/14/2012