Opec+ ministers say bigger group would be better

Some Opec+ ministers today called for more oil producing countries to join them in a bid to gain a larger share of the global market.

"Imagine if we are 60pc of the producers or 70pc of the producers [of the world]," the UAE's energy minister Suhail al-Mazrouei said at the Opec Seminar in Vienna today. "Imagine… we would do a better job."

The 13 members of Opec and 10 non-Opec countries form the Opec+ alliance, which accounts for just under 40pc of global crude production. It is unclear which producing countries could either be asked or would seek to join Opec+. Opec in June formally denied it had invited rising South American producer Guyana to be a member.

Equatorial Guinea's minister of mines and hydrocarbons Antonio Oburu Ondo said today that "the bigger [Opec] is the better it is and it just creates market certainty."

"Because having so many producers going in a different way and implementing different policies… I don't see how that will prevent market volatility," he said. "If we are larger, we can impact better on transparency and also with the certainty of data."

Azerbaijan's energy minister Parviz Shahbazov went further, suggesting "we need to expand beyond the realm of oil and into the energy sector as a whole because we are in a transitional time. We have to act widely."

By Aydin Calik, Bachar Halabi and Jon Mainwaring