Oil Price Targets Would Make a Far Better Goal
There's no easy way to measure supply and demand, making OPEC's efforts to game out a recovery from the pandemic a crapshoot.
China’s oil demand is recovering more quickly.
Photographer: STR/AFP via Getty Images
If you can’t hit the target, bring it closer. That seems to be the policy adopted by the OPEC+ alliance of oil producers as they make the world’s biggest-ever output cuts in an attempt to shore up oil prices.
After a meeting in January, the group’s co-leader, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman, announced that the producers were setting themselves a new target for their output cuts — restoring oil stockpiles in the developed countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to a new five-year average level.
They’re focusing on the OECD because its members report oil stockpiles in a (relatively) timely fashion — preliminary levels for the end of December were published by the International Energy Agency last week, although they will be revised for many months to come. Whereas other countries, like China, don’t publish oil stockpile levels at all.