Opec faces a bleak few years, with the group’s own figures showing it being crowded out of the supply picture by rival producers and forced into further cuts. While it points to a revival from the mid-2020s onwards, such projections are too hypothetical to be relied on.
The scale of the challenge facing Opec over the next five years was spelled out in the organization’s 2019 World Oil Outlook (WOO), released this week. Opec’s collective crude output has already been at multi-year lows in recent months (MEES, 4 October), but the group expects its total liquids output to decline by 3.8mn b/d between 2018 and 2024. By contrast, the medium-term outlook in last year’s WOO projected a fall of just 0.2mn b/d. (CONTINUED - 973 WORDS)
