Talk:OPEC

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An event in this article is a January 7 selected anniversary

http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=3&q=http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/List%2520of%2520official%2520languages%2520by%2520institution&e=8092 If OPEC has an official language, it would warrant mention. However, I was only able to find the one source (see above), and it didn't really look very convincing. Does OPEC carry out all of their meetings, etc in English, despite having 6 of the 11 members as Arabic speaking countries?

Seven out of 11 members are Arabic-speaking countries, actually, but nonetheless OPEC's official language is English. See the OPEC Statute, Article 6: [1] --Metropolitan90 08:28, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Removed generally regarded as a cartel and just called it a cartel. I don't know of anyone who thinks OPEC isn't a cartel.

Also removed statement about Saudi price of oil. The breakeven price of Saudi oil is very, very low.

It is now well known that the International Crude Oil prices depend largely on the USA's stand on Iraq. Every time the US plans to attack Iraq, the oil prices increase.

No. Venezula is a much higher impact on the current oil prices.

In fact, if I am not wrong, this has been happening in almost every year since the Gulf War. Given the situation, I seriously doubt if the US is trying to manipulate International Oil prices through its War on Iraq.

But, interestingly, there is yet another side to the story. Though the USA has large oil reserves, it has to import crude oil to meet its domestic demand. Now, this is puzzling, for any country which has to import a commodity, would not normally like to see the prices of the commodity rise.

The reason is that U.S. oil costs $10/barrel to produce while Saudi oil costs $2/barrel. It's just more efficient for the United States to import Saudi oil.

But, if US oil companies have some kind of an arrangement with major oil producing countries in the Gulf (For example an oil field taken on lease for a long period of time), through which they are able to get oil at prices that existed before the Gulf War began (or at least at prices below international parity), then things could be quite different.

The cost of producing oil at a well is determined by geology.

These companies would then surely find soaring oil prices to their liking, as they can then make huge profits. Also, oil has been greatly increased and is known as a freaking expensive thingumy...fuck

Oil company profits are remarkably independent of the price of oil. Suppose oil prices rise, oil companies increase the price to the consumer. Suppose oil prices fall, oil companies decrease the price to the consumer. The net result is that oil companies make more or less the same about of money regardless of the price of oil.

That makes no sense. Higher price - constant production cost = bigger profits. - Tbannist

What oil companies *hate* is unpredictability. Oil companies can live with high prices. They can live with low prices. What oil companies *hate* is not knowing what the price of oil is going to be, because this means that they can't make long term investments.

All this could be with the help of politicians in the US and elsewhere, who do this even after knowing that it could be against their country's interests.

In fact, besides these companies, oil-producing countries in the Gulf such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and even Iraq may be benefiting from the so-called dethroning of Saddam Hussein, as they have been getting better prices for their oil. However, the common man in every country including the US has been shelling out higher prices for oil and other commodities as well—indirectly contributed by the increase in oil prices, for no fault of his.

All the ideas expressed in this article are solely based on my assumptions. Nevertheless, I believe in what I have written, and call for a serious debate on the topic.

" is a rare example of a successful cartel" What does this mean exactly?

Most cartels do not last for long due to the incentive for members to covertly increase their production and thereby increase revenues and profits(called chiseling). mydogategodshat 01:02, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

This articles has a permanent link from http://opec.com --Imran 23:51, 25 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Some one explain this sentence

However gold had experienced similar price increases in the intermediate years since the gold standard was ended in 1971 without the existence of any gold cartel. Many maintain that it was US inflation that allowed such pricing power to global commodity producers.

Roadrunner 00:13, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I can give you an explanation, but do not interpret the explanation as support for the statement. There is an ongoing controversy between monetarist economists and Keynesian economists of the relative importance of the real economy (ie., the supply and demand for goods and services) and the monetary economy (ie., the supply and demand for money). Monetarists claim that the monetary economy drives most economic processes. To them, a constricted supply of crude oil (a real variable) will have little effect in the long run. They see the long run increase in oil prices, not as a result of OPEC's output restrictions, but as a result of monetary policy which since the early 1970s has abandoned the discipline of the gold standard, which allowed the growth of M1, which has lead to inflation, which increases the price of commodities. mydogategodshat 01:02, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Added founding date and members from http://www.historychannel.com/tdih/tdih.jsp?month=10272961&day=10272979&cat=10272940 - Tbannist

What's the link with Ehrlich-Simon bet ??--Chealer 11:36, 2004 Nov 26 (UTC)

Consumers =

Is there any petroleum consumer countries organization ??.

Yes, it is known as TRW -- The Rest of the World.

Inconsistency

The author says that Iraq switching to the Euro for oil imports may have caused the Gulf War. The Euro did not enter circulation until 2002, the Gulf War was in 1990. Perhaps he/she meant the Second Gulf war?

No he/she didn't. The author only maintains that economics would be damaged in the US if other countries had followed Iraq's decision. The author did not mention that it caused the Gulf War, the second OR first.

Trinidad & Tobago

Shouldn't contries like the one above that produce oil be included in the non-members?

Article name

Why isn't doesn't this article appear under the full name of the organization? This would make it consistent with the Wikipedia naming convnetion and with other international organizations, which are all spelled out? Kevintoronto

Member/nonmember list inconsistancy

The list of members includes former members, marked as such -- wouldn't it make more sense to put them in the list of nonmembers, marked as such? It'd also make the count above the list accurate.

The text: "Thanks to OPEC, member nations receive considerably more for the oil they export."

This is no longer the case because OPEC has a policy of maintaining the price of oil at $27 per barrel it is now at over $60 per barrel and all member states are producing oil at the fastest rate they can which means that thay have nothing to thnk OPEC for.

History Section

The history section of this article seems to wander quite far off topic without really addressing the history of the organization. Some oh so helpful person seems to have even removed what little information there was about its founding. I will try to fix this by going through the edit history (although I know very little about OPEC). And by the way, please sign your edits, people!Halidecyphon 06:49, 13 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I echo this. The History section doesn't even mention when/where/why OPEC was founded. That might be important. —the preceding unsigned comment is by 69.162.26.132 (talk • contribs)

Absolutely. I was going to start a thread about this here. It would appear that Halidecyphon's efforts were unsuccessful, since nothing seems to have changed since his September 2005 post. However, we do have a history of OPEC on the website, but it's at the 1973 oil crisis article. This needs to be amended. Regards, Redux 19:11, 5 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have now made alterations in the article to correct this: the "History" section was renamed to "Operations", since it wasn't really about the organization's history. I then created a new "History" section, using the information from another article of ours: 1973 oil crisis. The data was copied and pasted from there, so that we'd have it here as well. Regards, Redux 18:20, 6 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

yemen

should yemen really be listed as a non-member oil producer? they have very little oil. Arre 07:55, 13 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

why not, it produced 410,000 bbls of oil/day in march 2006, syria produced an equal amount, eygpt at 690,000 bbls/day and oman at 770,000 bbls/day. I would hardly say that it wasn't an insignifiacnt amount. also exploration in Yemen is picking up in recent years. These firgures where from April's edition of "World Oil" Philbentley 21:43, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Headquarters

Why is the seat of OPEC in Vienna? Austria seems like an odd choice: non - producing, home to no major oil company, it has no history of international influence (like that of France, the UK or others)? Also, Geneva used to be the seat of OPEC, but it moved after 5 years to Vienna. Again, an unusual choice of sorts, don't you think?

Operations

the last paragraph of the operation section is not very clear, it credits Hugo Chavez with getting the OPEC Countries in 1998 to scale back production. Chavez only became president in Dec of 1998. So they way it reads at the moment isn't very clear.

Have jsut been goggling around and can see what the orginal auther was trying to say. What happened was After 98 when Chavez took over he cut Venezuela's production down to the OPEC quota which previously it had been over producing. Will get round to clearing this section up a in a bit, wasa very good article in the Motely Fool website covering this. Philbentley 21:11, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]