Be Prepared For An Oil Price Spike
The recent collapse in oil prices has taken pundits and oil producers by surprise. It was only six months ago that prices were over $100/bbl and at that time they had been above $100/bbl for three and a half years. In fact the stability had become uncanny, so perhaps we should have seen the collapse coming. I would like to claim I had been prescient but sadly I wasn’t.
There are lots of conspiracy theories on offer, but it seems to me the root of Saudi Arabia’s refusal to defend the oil price lies in its fear of a repetition of the loss of market share that OPEC suffered in the early eighties. But there are good reasons why the 2010’s are not the 1980’s.
I like to analyze the numbers, as therein lies the explanation for OPEC and more particularly Saudi Arabia’s stance. Let’s look back to the early eighties and see what happened to OPEC’s market share after the oil price shocks of the seventies.
Oil prices since 1965, in 2015 dollars with both total world oil supply and OPEC market share and spare capacity up until 1990 shown in the background.
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