Venezuela Now China’s Third Largest Oil Supplier, Ramirez Says
Venezuela is shipping 364,000 barrels of oil a day to China, making it the third-largest supplier to the Asian nation, Energy and Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said.
The Latin American nation is currently producing 3 million barrels a day and expects to expand capacity to “at least” 4 million barrels as early as 2014, Ramirez said today in Quito, Ecuador, after a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Crude prices will rise to $100 next year, a level Ramirez said would be “fair” for both producers and consumers, making up for the “the dollar’s weakness.”
Oil will “get to $100 because prices are recovering, the economy is showing a slowly but sure recovery so we should get to those levels at some point next year,” he said.
OPEC, supplier of about 40 percent of the world’s oil, decided not to alter production quotas, which remain unchanged since late 2008. There’s “plenty of oil” in the market, and the situation is “very comfortable” for consumers, Secretary- General Abdulla El-Badri said today.
OPEC didn’t discuss an eventual increase of production in Quito today and should maintain the same level of output “even through 2011,” Ramirez told reporters on his way out of the Swissotel in the Ecuadorian capital. “We know the criteria: it’s the fundamentals. And at the moment, we don’t have that discussion,” he said.
To contact the reporters on this story: Juan Pablo Spinetto in Quito at jspinetto@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stephen Voss at sev@bloomberg.net Dan Stets at dstets@bloomberg.net
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