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Assistant Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources for Petroleum Affairs: The World We Live in Is Changing Faster than Ever Leading to the Emergence of New Patterns of Economic Relations 5 Riyadh
term fundamentals of the energy complex remain robust. In the oil market, like any in other market, temporary factors such as concerns about global economic recovery, geopolitical events, and positioning in paper markets, can affect short-term price movement. But for a major oil producer and exporter such as Saudi Arabia with long-term interest in the stability of the market, such daily, weekly or even monthly gyrations have little meaning, and constitute a source of noise around a solid trend. Instead, the main focus of the Kingdom has always been on the medium and long-term fundamentals, especially as Saudi Arabia has been successful in the last few years at increasing its economic resilience against temporary weaknesses in oil markets, as a result of its prudent fiscal and monetary policies. The GCC will continue to play a central role within this complex energy system. Views that the US shale will erode the important role that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf producers have played in global energy markets are misguided. In addition to the size of its reserves and its production, a key factor that makes Saudi Arabia stand out is that it is the only country with usable spare oil production capacity. In case of supply disruptions due to geopolitical or technical factors, and there have been many such disruptions in recent years, Saudi Arabia has used its spare capacity to fill the supply gap and stabilize oil prices. Between 2011 and 2013, it is estimated that more than 1.6 billion barrels of oil production were lost due to outages. GCC producers have proactively used their spare capacity to fill the gap and prevent oil prices from spiraling. The combined output of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE has risen from around 14 million b/d prior to the start of the Arab Spring, to above 16 million b/d for much of the last three years, the Assistant Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources for Petroleum Affairs said. --More 19:41 LOCAL TIME 16:41 GMT تغريد
