‘I would not forfeit the precautionary approach’ to oil production policy, Saudi energy minister says

Published

2 years ago

October 8, 2023

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Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman addresses the opening session of the Middle East and North Africa Climate Week in Riyadh, on Oct. 8, 2023.

Fayez Nureldine | Afp | Getty Images

The influential Saudi and Russia-led oil producers’ alliance is preventively prepared to wait months for guidance from “real numbers” before adjusting policies amid price volatility in the crude market, the Saudi energy minister said Sunday.

“Yes, we may be delayed with a decision on what to do, but I would not forfeit the precautionary approach, even if it goes beyond a month or two, or three or four months, or five months,” Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman told CNBC’s Dan Murphy on the sidelines of the MENA Climate Week in Riyadh.

The Riyadh-headed Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and their non-OPEC allies, together known as OPEC+, last October agreed and have since upheld a decision to remove 2 million barrels per day of production from the oil market. Since then, some OPEC+ members have implemented additional voluntary declines outside of group decisions, with a roughly 1.66 million-barrels-per-day cut stretching until the end of 2024, and with Saudi Arabia and Russia respectively lowering their supplies by an additional 1 million barrels per day and 300,000 barrels per day until the end of this year.

A technical OPEC+ committee, the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee, convened Oct. 4 to review market fundamentals and individual country compliance with production obligations. It concluded its assembly without calling for an emergency ministerial meeting to adjust output strategy.

Asked whether the group might need to entertain further coordinated production action to maintain market stability at the start of 2024, Prince Abdulaziz said: “We hope we should not,” but stressed, “Don’t you ever discard what OPEC+ can do for the purpose of attending to this market.”

The recent supply crunch and recoveries in demand initially propped up prices near $95 per barrel, but recently once more tumbled on macro-economic concerns spurred by a high interest rate environment. Oil prices have been a key contributor to global inflation since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, especially in Europe and G7 countries, where consumers have lost access to sanctioned Russian barrels.

Further weighing on prices, the Paris-based International Energy Watchdog last month predicted that demand for oil, gas and coal will peak by 2030 — triggering vocal objections from OPEC, whose officials have repeatedly and controversially advocated for simultaneous investment in fossil fuels and renewable supplies in order to avoid short-term energy shortages.

“We want to demonstrate to the world that we are going to be using every source of energy,” Prince Abdulaziz reiterated on Sunday, noting that the kingdom is “dead serious about attending to the issue of climate change. We’re not the naysayer. In fact, we have a conviction that the science is saying that it is there and we have to attend to it.”

The energy transition commitment of OPEC+ countries — including of group member the United Arab Emirates, which will host the COP28 conference that kicks off in late November — has been heavily criticized because of the high carbon emissions generated by the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

Conflict impact

Observers are following the market open to see which way oil futures prices turn, following two days of renewed turbulence in the Middle East, where Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a lethal and decisive attack against Israel that claimed at least 600 Israeli lives at the time of writing, according to official Israeli communications. The hostilities took place a day after the 50^th anniversary of the fourth Arab-Israeli war. Critically for crude markets, the offensive of 1973 led to a global energy crisis, resulting from an embargo of Saudi-led Arab oil producing nations — which back the Palestinian cause — against the U.S. for supporting Israel.

The latest conflict erupts at a high-stakes point in Middle Eastern diplomacy, after months of the U.S. doggedly pushing for a normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia — who earlier this year resumed relations with arch-rival Iran, historically a supporter of Hamas.

Asked on whether OPEC+ has the toolkit to address the latest Israeli-Hamas escalation, Prince Abdulaziz deferred comment to the Saudi foreign ministry, but stressed that the oil producers’ alliance “dealt with the ups and we’ve dealt with the downs” of global challenges, including the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I honestly believe that the best thing I could say is that the cohesion of OPEC+ should not be challenged. We’ve been through the worst, I don’t think we will have to go through any terrible situation at all,” he added.

Environment

I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

Published

2 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.

Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!

I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!

Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.

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To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.

Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!

Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.

The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.

The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!

I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.

That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.

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OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

Published

3 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

The OPEC logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying OPEC icons in Ankara, Turkey, on June 25, 2024.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Eight oil-producing nations of the OPEC+ alliance agreed on Saturday to increase their collective crude production by 548,000 barrels per day, as they continue to unwind a set of voluntary supply cuts.

This subset of the alliance — comprising heavyweight producers Russia and Saudi Arabia, alongside Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — met digitally earlier in the day. They had been expected to increase their output by a smaller 411,000 barrels per day.

In a statement, the OPEC Secretariat attributed the countries’ decision to raise August daily output by 548,000 barrels to “a steady global economic outlook and current healthy market fundamentals, as reflected in the low oil inventories.”

The eight producers have been implementing two sets of voluntary production cuts outside of the broader OPEC+ coalition’s formal policy.

One, totaling 1.66 million barrels per day, stays in effect until the end of next year.

Under the second strategy, the countries reduced their production by an additional 2.2 million barrels per day until the end of the first quarter.

They initially set out to boost their production by 137,000 barrels per day every month until September 2026, but only sustained that pace in April. The group then tripled the hike to 411,000 barrels per day in each of May, June, and July — and is further accelerating the pace of their increases in August.

Oil prices were briefly boosted in recent weeks by the seasonal summer spike in demand and the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which threatened both Tehran’s supplies and raised concerns over potential disruptions of supplies transported through the key Strait of Hormuz.

At the end of the Friday session, oil futures settled at $68.30 per barrel for the September-expiration Ice Brent contract and at $66.50 per barrel for front month-August Nymex U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude.

Environment

Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

Published

17 hours ago

July 4, 2025

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Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Trump’s Big Beautiful bill becoming law and going after EVs and solar, Tesla, Ford, and GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

Today’s episode is brought to you by Bosch Mobility Aftermarket—A global leader and trusted provider of automotive aftermarket parts. To celebrate Amazon Prime Day July 8th through 11th, Bosch Mobility is offering exclusive savings on must-have auto parts and tools. Learn more here.

The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel.

As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.

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After the show ends at around 5 p.m. ET, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:

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Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the podcast: