A Nigerian, Mr. Mohammed Barkindo, who was the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, from 2009 to 2010, has been announced as the Secretary-General of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC.
Barkindo, was recently nominated by the Federal Government for the position, and was chosen at the 13-member oil cartel’s 169th conference in Vienna to replace Libya’s Abdalla El-Badri. He was at a time the acting Secretary-General of OPEC in 2006.
OPEC meeting today failed to excite the market.
Reuters reports that Saudi Arabia promised on Thursday not to flood the oil market with extra barrels even as OPEC failed to agree on output policy, with Iran insisting on the right to raise production steeply.
Tensions between the Sunni-led kingdom and the Shi’ite Islamic Republic have been the highlights of several previous OPEC meetings, including in December 2015 when the group failed to agree on a formal output target for the first time in years.
Tensions, however, were less acute on Thursday as Saudi Arabia’s new energy minister, Khalid al-Falih, showed Riyadh wanted to be more conciliatory and his Iranian peer Bijan Zanganeh kept his criticism of Riyadh to an unusual minimum.
In a rare compromise, OPEC also decided unanimously to appoint Nigeria’s Mohammed Barkindo as its new secretary-general after years of friction over the issue.
Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies had tried to propose OPEC set a new collective ceiling in an attempt to repair the group’s waning importance. But Thursday’s meeting ended with no new policy or ceiling amid resistance from Iran.
Despite the setback, Saudi Arabia moved to soothe market fears that failure to reach any deal would prompt OPEC’s largest producer, already pumping near record highs, to raise production further to punish rivals and gain additional market share.
“We will be very gentle in our approach and make sure we don’t shock the market in any way,” Falih told reporters.
“There is no reason to expect that Saudi Arabia is going to go on a flooding campaign,” Falih said when asked whether Saudi Arabia could accelerate production.
The market has grown increasingly used to OPEC clashes over the past two years as political foes Riyadh and Tehran fight proxy wars in Syria and Yemen.
