Saudi Arabia ready to tolerate low oil prices to keep market share

For now though, oil prices continue to drop with some predicting they could get as low as $15 a barrel. “Budget revenues and currency earnings would be affected the most by the falling prices”, the Minister said.

The cost of petrol and diesel is expected to reduce further, with oil prices reaching levels not seen since 2003.

He added: “Demand, which was all being lead by China, is slowing down significantly”.

Any meeting that would take place would be to review OPEC’s position to see if there was any need to change its strategy, Kachikwu said, adding that the meeting could take place in February or March.

Mr Lavin expects underlying demand for oil to push prices up and that “we should see it level out and probably increase during the second half of the year – it’s just a case of when that happens”.

Oil and gas expert George Booth of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com said that the NCB’s price predictions are perhaps “on the optimistic side”.

$30 a barrel is still way more than oil cost in some years past, but it’s cheap compared to $145 a barrel, which we saw not so long ago.

As the global oil slide continued, the Indian basket of crude oils closed trade on Tuesday at a 13-year low of $27.33 a barrel, according to official data released here on Wednesday.

The global head of oil content for Platts, Dave Ernsberger, said that began to happen as soon as US Congressional leaders lifted the longstanding restrictions on US crude oil exports in December.

The Russian federal budget for 2016 is based around the oil price of $50 per barrel.

At a time when oversupply is the new market norm, Ernsberger worries that it also poses important new questions for the rest of the world, “where the United States could, intriguingly, be jostling with Iran as the latest member of a cast of oil producers looking to find a home for surplus crude oil in, a world now awash with oil”.

The “known-knowns” are scary enough and there are many of them; it’s the “unknown unknowns” that could derail the market in either direction.