By Steve Scherer
OTTAWA (Reuters) – G20 energy ministers on Friday agreed on the need for oil price stability and a well-functioning market, but did not hammer out the details of how it would be achieved, said Canada’s natural resources minister, Seamus O’Regan.
The G20 call “was about finding the mechanisms to achieve price stability,” O’Regan told reporters in a teleconference shortly after the meeting ended.
All countries agreed that their economies needed a “well-functioning and stable oil market” and agreed to set up a focus group to coordinate the Group of 20 response going forward.
“We’re not where we need to be yet,” he added, saying oil curtailment “numbers” had not been discussed.
Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on Friday he expected oil production cuts by countries outside of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies (OPEC+) group to amount to 5 million barrels per day (bpd).
Novak told Russian state television channel Rossiya-24 that Canada, which is not a member of OPEC+, was ready to cut oil output by around 1 million bpd. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, extracting some 4.9 million barrels in February.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday said that efforts to ease the global oil glut should be done in a “concerted” way, without indicating whether the country would limit its own output.
“We recognize that this is a global challenge for many, many different countries and having a concerted approach is extremely important,” Trudeau said of efforts to stabilize oil prices, speaking at a daily news conference.
The coronavirus pandemic has slashed oil demand as countries shut down much of their economies, and OPEC has also flooded the world with additional oil in a dispute with Russia.
(Reporting by Steve Scherer; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Rosalba O’Brien)
