LONDON: Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) ministers met with partners and rivals in Houston this week as they try to figure out whether to prolong production cuts. That decision only got harder.
At the CERAWeek conference in the Texas oil hub, representatives of Opec huddled both with Russia, its main ally in an effort to clear a global glut, and executives from the US shale industry – the group’s key competitor. Yet Opec’s de-facto leader Saudi Arabia, which said in January that six months of output curbs would be enough, sounded less certain about what to do next.