When Opec’s 12 oil ministers meet in Vienna on Thursday, the veiled rivalry between two of the men at the table promises to alter the club’s balance of power in the years ahead.
Hussain Al-Shahristani, the Iraqi minister, and Masoud Mir-Kazemi, his Iranian counterpart, are playing a unique game of one-upmanship. On October 4, Iraq upgraded the size of its proven oil reserves to 143bn barrels, a 24 per cent rise that placed the country third in the global league after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Most sensitively, Iraq also overtook Iran to become, on paper at least, the second most richly endowed country in the Middle East.
But Iraq’s lead lasted only a week. On Monday, Mr Mir-Kazemi responded by upgrading Iran’s reserves to 150.3bn barrels, seizing back his country’s supremacy over Iraq. In practice, the different methods used to calculate and define oil reserves allow considerable leeway to massage the figures.
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