Saudis Hold Asian July Exports At April Levels - 9 -10% Below Contracted Amounts

[hatrack]

TOKYO/SEOUL - Top oil exporter Saudi Arabia told Asian lifters to expect the same crude volume for July as they have been getting since April, showing no signs of boosting production to soften prices near $70 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia will supply crude oil to Japan and South Korea at about 9,5-10,0% below contracted volumes in July, the same as June, two Japanese industry sources and one South Korean source said today.

Saudi’s cuts have been kept unchanged since April supplies, a deeper reduction compared with 7-8% below contracted volumes for March. Saudi Arabia sells about half of its 7-million barrels per day of oil exports to Asia, including Japan, which buys about 1,1-million barrels of crude from the kingdom every day.

The steady volume shows that the Organisation of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) kingpin is still keeping a cap on supply, after the Opec cartel pledged to curb supplies by a total of 1,7-million barrels per day, including a 500,000-barrels per day installment effective from February 1, after prices slid from records above $78 a barrel last July.

EDIT

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/world.aspx?ID=BD4A488819

[Lasher]

1. Or maybe it's a peak oil thing

If so the Saudis would not be doing this intentionally.

[Botany]

2. And so the real reason for the war comes out .... OIL

Saudi Arabia might have hit it's peak production and
the amount left can no longer meet demand.

So with this basic bit of petroleum geology knowledge
being out there Dick Cheney hold an "Energy Summit" in
March of 2001 and 2 years later we are in Iraq because of

1) WMDs?
2) ConnectionS to 9/11?
3) Spreading Democracy through out the Mid East?
4) A threat to America and the West?
5) Connections to al Qaeda?

or

6) OIL



notice the pipeline @ the bottom of the picture ....
This document was supposed to have been @ Cheney's Energy Summit

[GliderGuider]

3. I've wondered the very same thing.

And wrote this article about it. I've excerpted the introduction below:

In this article I will present research that supports a rather startling hypothesis: that the USA invaded Iraq primarily to enable the secret diversion of a portion of Iraq’s oil production to Saudi Arabia. This was done in order to disguise the fact that Saudi Arabia’s oil output has peaked, and may be in permanent decline. The evidence for this conclusion is circumstantial, but it does knit up many of the loose threads in the mystery of the American administration’s motivation for invasion.

To lay the groundwork we need to set out a couple of assumptions.

The primary assumption is that the world’s oil production has been on a plateau for the last two years, and in fact we may be teetering on the brink of the production decline predicted by the Peak Oil theory. Such a decline could be dangerous to the world economy, both directly through the loss of economic capacity and indirectly (and perhaps more importantly) through the loss of investor confidence in the global economic structure.

The second assumption is that the oil production of Saudi Arabia is key to maintaining the global oil supply. Saudi Arabia supplies over 10% of the world’s crude oil, with over half of that coming from one enormous field named Ghawar. There is a large and well-informed body of opinion that believes that if Saudi oil production goes into decline the world will follow because there is not the spare capacity anywhere else to make up for such a decline. Saudi Arabia is notoriously tight-lipped about the state of their oil fields, and in fact oil production information is considered to be a state secret. The only trustworthy information the world really has about Saudi Arabia’s oil are their aggregated production figures.

The conclusion that can be drawn from these two assumptions is that if Saudi Arabia’s production began to decline and the world found out about it, there would be a significant risk of a world-wide economic panic that would destabilize markets and throw nations like the USA into a recession or depression that would be worse than the actual damage done by the loss of the oil. We can assume that the prevention or postponement of such a crisis would be an extremely high priority for the administrations of both the USA and Saudi Arabia.