The OPEC+ meeting that began on Dec. 1 is still technically “in session” 11 days later. Remarkably, perhaps, it’s still short of being the oil producer group’s longest gathering — it has another week to go to beat the one held in October 1986.
This time, of course, it is much easier to conduct a lengthy meeting. With the deliberations held by videoconference, ministers are free to conduct their normal duties until the chairman decides they need to reconvene. Thirty-five years ago, the ministers and their delegations were ensconced in Geneva hotel suites, far from their desks back home. Then, as now, they were grappling with a market that was slowly recovering from an unprecedented demand shock — although the trigger was very different.
Right now, the OPEC+ group is doing most good by doing nothing. The meeting is “in session” in name only. Nonetheless, it is proving to be a very successful strategy to support crude prices in the face of uncertainty over the omicron variant’s impact on oil demand.
The ministers convened amid widely held expectations that they would delay January’s planned output increase.
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