Nigeria and 11 other oil exporting countries in the world have begun informal talks to address skyrocketing oil prices by jerking up crude output, Kuwait’s oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Al-Abdullah al-Sabah revealed on Tuesday.
Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Lamido Sanusi had earlier stated that the high oil prices are posing inflation threats to Nigeria by making his job difficult but Al-Sabah who declared that Nigeria and other members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are in informal talks about raising oil output, added however that they have yet to make any decisions about adjusting supply.
He said that OPEC is closely monitoring the situation and stands ready to act if needed.
“From what we know, a number of countries are happy to check the market if there is any shortage,” he said.
The 12-nation OPEC has so far held its official output quotas unchanged, even as massive protests across the oil rich Middle East have pushed global oil prices to their highest levels since late 2008.
An uprising Libya has stoked supply concerns and the producer bloc is facing increasing pressure to pump more oil into the market to ease prices.
Some members of the group, which supply about 35 percent of the world’s oil, have begun talks about supply, Sheik Ahmed al-Abdullah al-Sabah told reporters outside Kuwait’s parliament on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, in the last seven weeks, Nigeria is estimated to have accrued $2.1 billion into its excess crude account (ECA) at the minimum, enabled by spikes in crude prices amid conflicts beginning mid-January in North Africa.
This figure excludes domestic excess crude proceeds, as an investigation into the proceeds was based on exports of an average of 1.6 million barrels of crude per day, with the daily difference between increased crude prices and the budgeted benchmark price of $65.
