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摘要

The 168th meeting of the conference of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) turned out to be a damp squib. In the run-up to the conference, there was much talk of the Saudis relenting and agreeing to cuts in production if other oil producers would also make cuts. In the event, there was no agreement, and Brent crude fell to around US$41/barrel as of 7 December 2015. "It is hard to imagine a more negative result," said analysts at Commerzbank Research. There was much speculation ahead of the meeting about whether the cartel would cut production in order to try to boost prices. That OPEC should ultimately have failed to agree on any official cap to production and merely state that member countries should watch market trends closely comes as a surprise, but not a nice surprise for anyone involved in the oil field supply chain, including operators of offshore support vessels (OSVs).