ROME – After only a few hours to figure out that this time something has changed in depth. Exxon, the first global energy group, yesterday lost $ 16.8 billion in value to the New York Stock Exchange: a sum equal to maneuver a budget law in Italy. Taken together, the major Western oil burned over one hundred billion capitalization.
In the meantime, they began to take the titles of the groups at high energy consumption, American airlines in the head. This week, OPEC has delivered its latest surprise to markets, and those who had not reckoned now is trying to run for cover. Brent travels to share $ 70 a barrel, 8% less than the Thursday before announcements of OPEC but, above all, 40% below the levels of June. The index American WTI lost in a sitting 10% to $ 66.15.
The old sign of countries that guarantees 40% of the oil produced in the world has done something that not everyone had expected has stopped. Decided not to take action. Faced with an excess of world production that Venezuela is estimated at two million barrels a day, has not cut even half a million. Undoubtedly the first responsible for the choice was Ali Al-Naimi, oil minister of Saudi Arabia, and as such, mind and voice of the first manufacturer in the world. The kingdom’s Sunni Gulf that alone is worth about 12 million barrels per day (but only extracts 9), decided that the price may fall further: it is not the time to turn off the taps, even though the market is too liquid.
On the question of energy is being felt the slowdown of the European economy, that of China and the American breakthrough: the revolution of “fracking”, the oil and gas extracted from shale rock, now close to the United States ‘goal of self-sufficiency in energy. If these are the facts, are not so unique as to reconcile those who observe them from New York, Washington or European capitals.
To explain the choice Saudi dropping prices, after all, not just the certainty that the thresholds profit for Riyadh remain high: to produce a barrel in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula costs just $ 12. When the game is in the price of crude, also politics always enters into the equation. In the investment banks on Wall Street for weeks you are doing so even street readings related to the relationships of the major OPEC producers with Russia and the United States.
When choosing OPEC not to proceed to a cut, some see a favor Saudi American ally against Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Certainly to Moscow the fall of crude oil is a more intractable problem than it is to Riyadh, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, the most powerful of the seven United Arab Emirates. Putin now need a price above one hundred dollars a barrel to ensure the stability of its economy and the financial system. It was not so in 2007, when Russia grew by 8.5% with an average price of just $ 72 a barrel. But already in 2012, with prices averaging $ 111, the economy had more than halved its cruising speed. Certainly weigh six hundred billion dollars of foreign debt of large Russian companies.
The collapse of the ruble, whose value was almost halved in a few months, exponentially increases the weight of those debts. Only next year to 130 billion repayments await Russian companies, revenues from oil are not enough to fund their deadlines and someone is in trouble: the giant state-owned Rosneft alone is worth 5% of the world production of crude oil, but has foreign debts for 60 billion and has just asked for help to Putin to support them. It is not a surprise. Before finishing under sanctions, Rosneft had already dared investments everywhere, even in Italy (in the galaxy Pirelli and Saras). To drive it is Igor Sechin, a former colleague of Putin in the KGB. Now, however, the choice not to move Saudi OPEC can only aggravate the difficulties of the Russian oligarchs and put the leader of Moscow with increasingly cornered.
Not all analysts are convinced, however, that the choices OPEC represent really a favor to America. Some suspect the opposite. As revealed yesterday in a seminar on energy-Spadolini Foundation New Anthology in Florence, the move to Al-Naimi could aim to put out of business the new US competition. Depending on the plants, the hydrocarbons extracted from shale rock in America produce income at prices between 40 and 115 US dollars. For the Saudis, keep the oil at 70 means hope to displace part of the new American production. The same extraction of oil from tar sands in Canada, sustainable only $ 80, it would end up costing hundreds of billions of losses to Western companies that have invested. So OPEC with low prices hopes to slow the development of the new generation of Western technologies that are making the old sign less and less decisive. That was so, the price instability is likely to be discharged elsewhere: producing countries such as Iran’s nuclear program, Nigeria, where most children are born each year throughout the European Union or Iraq besieged by ISIS need that crude oil back to $ 100. Below, they lack the financial oxygen. So the barrel increasingly resembles a bomb that must roll at the door of someone else’s home.
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