Russia has no plans to follow the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries and cut its oil output, deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov said, the Interfax news agency reported Tuesday.
In October, the cartel decided on a larger-than-expected cut in oil production of 1.2 million barrels a day, and called on non-member oil producing countries to also take steps to support prices.
Analysts have said that OPEC is right to be concerned about production growth from countries outside the cartel, since non-OPEC oil supply is likely to grow faster than demand in 2007, threatening prices. Zhukov said Russia would continue its efforts to boost hydrocarbon production growth in the future, but he also admitted that the country's output would not expand as quickly as it did in the past. Russia's crude and condensate production grew at a rate of about 10% in the early years of this decade but has since slowed significantly.
Russian crude oil and condensate output dropped 0.4% month-on-month in October to 9.71 million barrels a day, down from a post-Soviet high of 9.76 million b/d in August.
Russia's average crude and condensate daily output for the first 10 months of 2006 was up 2.3% compared with the first 10 months of last year, however.
"Russia has no such plan" to lower oil output in line with OPEC, Zhukov said, according to the news agency Prime-Tass. "Russia will expand its oil production, only perhaps not as quickly as in the beginning of this century."
Analysts have said Russia appeared unlikely to heed OPEC's call to arms. But some also noted that the Russian government has raised its share of the country's total oil output from less than 10% to more than a third, a move that means the state would be more capable of having a direct impact in daily production levels now than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
According to OPEC's Monthly Oil Market Report for October, non-OPEC oil supply is forecast to grow by 1.8 million barrels a day in 2007, the highest rate since 1984, surpassing demand growth by 600,000 barrels a day.
At 1007 GMT Nymex WTI December was $59.63 per barrel -40 cents on the day.
(Dow Jones Newswires, 07/11/2006)