The Agreed Leadership
Russia is impetuously breaking away from the world second producer of crude, Saudi Arabia. Past December, for instance, Russia’s daily output stood at 9.67 million bbl, 11 percent above Saudi Arabia, according to Russian Statistics Service.
Russia will strengthen its standing on the world market of crude, predicted the International Energy Agency. The 2004 leader of crude production, Saudi Arabia has been gradually trimming the output in the past three years. The matter at stake is hardly the competition where the Middle East is outpaced by Russia. It is rather the different strategies of working worldwide.
The OPEC member, Saudi Arabia is the balance of the oil cartel. Its reserves allow it to step up crude exports by over 2 million bbl a day, or roughly 3 percent of the world production, any time it likes. But Saudi Arabia traditionally trims the crude output at the greatest extent, should OPEC make the respective decision.
More likely than not, Russia’s leadership in the crude ranking is just the temporarily decision presented by Saudi Arabia to its northern neighbor for reasons of sales opportunities.
Of interest is that, in this race, the strategies of Russia, Iran and China as well as the strategy of the world third producer of crude, the United States, are relatively the same. In terms of the crude output, the United States is just a third behind Russia, while the consumption speed is much higher there.
For the above four blockbusters, the continuous growth of crude production in Russia is one of the core incentives of their game. At the same time, Russia’s involvement in the large-scale speculations on the world energy markets doesn’t go beyond some planetary initiatives of energy security and disputes with the CIS. In this environment, the worldwide leadership of Russia hardly appears permanent.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Feb. 26, 2007
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