Saudi Arabia has no private papers owned by Saudi individuals. It does not have opposition press, either, because the idea of forming political parties is originally unlikely at least nowadays. If there was a Saudi paper like Al-Masry Al-Youm – for example – it would pose an important question to King Abdullah or the Saudi regime in general: How does the Kingdom produce the same quantity of oil although its prices went down by some 25% throughout last summer? Last summer, oil prices recorded some $150 a barrel and were expected to reach $ 200 a barrel.
After that, the curve started suddenly to go down till it reached $46 a barrel. The price is also expected to go down. For his part, the Algerian Energy Minister and OPEC President Chakib Khelil said the price could decline to less than $30 a barrel during the first months of the coming year. He added that OPEC, which once wanted to keep prices at $50, has to cut production by five million barrels a day.
It is known that OPEC met in Vienna after oil prices started to collapse last September. It decided to cut production by 1.5 million barrels per day as of last November, but this reduction failed to stop that awful decline in prices.
In a meeting in Cairo two weeks ago, OPEC members did not agree on any reductions of any kind. They decided to postpone taking a decision in this regard till their coming meeting in January in Algeria!
I just would like to say that what was received by Saudi Arabia from the sale of single barrel in the summer equals what it gets now from the sale of some four barrels although it knows that it deals with unrenewable wealth and that the day will come when Saudi oil will run out. Indeed, this day is not so far, as some people say it will happen in 25 years! Saudi Arabia produces some 12 million barrels a day and the surplus of sale – either when the price is at its peak or is low, as is currently the case – is invested in the US market. In fact, this reserve is, in a way or another, the coming generations' right. Therefore, this right should be saved for them. Strangely enough, Saudi Arabia in particular, and OPEC in general did not reduce their production although they used to immediately cut it in case of any relative decline in prices and not an enormous decline as is the case now! We should not stop, under any conditions, posing the question, which is asked in Cairo every hour about the repercussions of plundering gas wealth once in the form of subsidized energy and other time in the form of exported gas at prices less than global ones.
