Iran is ready to negotiate on oil market with Saudis

Bijan Zangeneh Iran’s Oil Minister said that his country is ready to negotiate with Saudi Arabia and other
OPEC members over the current conditions in international oil markets.

Zangeneh said. “We support any form of dialogue and cooperation with OPEC member states including Saudi Arabia.”

He also said that some Persian Gulf countries have declared, that they are looking for trying to make economic
benefits for themselves by helping to push down oil prices.

Zangeneh said. “But what they want to achieve is not at all for economic gains,” he said “If there were a strong political will, the price of oil would have been balanced within one single week.” he added

“None of the oil producers is happy with the existing prices, which will harm suppliers in the long term.”
Zangeneh added that Iran needs as much as $200bn in investments to revamp its oil industry.

Tehran recently resumed oil exports after Western sanctions over its nuclear programme were lifted, and
announced it plans to produce 500,000 barrels a day.

According to Zangeneh , “there is a political will behind OPEC indecision over production ceiling in the organization.”

Nearly a million barrels of oil is being produced by OPEC each day than its 30 million bpd ceiling for
the past 16 months.

Saudi Arabia and other Arab members of OPEC have so far stopped the group from propping up prices by lowering output, in an apparent effort to use the current slump to win market shares from the US, where oil production is costlier than in the Gulf.

Zangeneh has described the decision a “historic mistake”, saying “making up for this big mistake and reviving the quota system in OPEC is a very hard task.”

The overproduction by Saudi Arabia and non-OPEC producers, is up to 2.5 million bpd of excess oil in the market which has caused crude prices to lose around 60% of their value since mid-2014.