A long-planned International Energy Agency meeting Monday to discuss the factors behind the record oil price is set to hear from officials from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and Cargill Inc. as well as from oil companies such as Norway's StatoilHydro ASA (STO), sources said Thursday.
The meeting was planned in November and comes as oil prices are rising to a new record, defying indications of slowing demand and healthy oil and product stockpiles.
The meeting won't generate policy ideas but is intended to lift the lid on what is going on in the oil market now, insight that may find its way into the work of the agency and others in future, a person familiar with details of the talks said Thursday.
Experts from the OPEC, oil pricing agency Platts, the CFTC, as well as oil company representatives, are to meet behind closed doors Monday to unpick the factors driving the oil price beyond $110 a barrel.
An official from OPEC's Petroleum Market Analysis department may attend, and a source said Cargill's energy and transport analysis chief John Brunton will be there. A Statoil executive is set to attend too.
The meeting will discuss "the complex process of price formation," the Paris-based agency said in a statement e-mailed to Dow Jones Newswires Wednesday. No press conference is planned afterward and the session won't be open to the public.
As gloomy U.S. and European economic news has leaked out, oil futures in New York have, since the first week of February, confounded expectations and risen by more than 25%.
"The last two weeks has had very little to do with fundamentals", Mark Lewis, managing director of U.K.-based Energy Market Consultants (UK) Ltd, told Dow Jones Newswires Thursday.
Lewis, who will make a presentation at the IEA meeting, said: "Prior to that, prices were closely linked to fundamentals."
OPEC, he noted, "has learnt over the last four years that it wasn't $40 oil that was going to kill the market, it wasn't $50 or $60 oil," so it has been content to see prices test the resilience of the consumers.
Now, however, "nobody's dictating it (prices) at the moment," allowing prices to fly. "The problem everyone has is to fix the level of the price."
A weakening U.S. dollar and investors piling into commodities to protect against inflation have been cited as reasons for the oil price rise, yet many experts agree that oil demand and supply fundamentals do not justify current prices, and many have expressed confusion at oil's continued surge.
"Experts will be attending from a broad spectrum of the industry: financial, trading, producing, refining and economic institutions," and would be attending "in their personal capacity to express personal views," the IEA said.