Oil prices are likely to stay low for a long time after falling more than 40 percent in the past year, said officials from two OPEC nations.
Nigeria and Algeria both warned that oil prices, currently at around $60 a barrel, probably won’t recover to the 2011-2013 level of more than $100 a barrel.
“You forecast at your own risk, but it seems to me that we should be regarding this as a permanent shock,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Nigerian finance minister, said on a panel discussion Sunday in Washington near the end of the International Monetary Fund’s spring meetings.
“We should prepare our economies for that eventuality.”
A verdict will be recorded later in the inquest of British victims of a bloody terrorist siege at an Algerian gas plant.
Six Britons and a UK-based Colombian were among 40 hostages who were killed by al Qaida-linked Islamists during a four-day stand-off in January 2013 at the In Amenas complex.
Assistant Coroner for West Sussex Nicholas Hilliard QC will hand down a verdict and narrative conclusions at the Old Bailey this afternoon.
At the start of the inquest last year, the Recorder of London had said: “Each was wholly innocent of events which unfolded when a group of heavily armed went into the In Amenas gas facility.
“Forty innocent people lost their lives, such was the scale of events. Each and every death is a wholly separate tragedy and leaves family and friends devastated and bereft.”
Petrofac has signed two strategic contract agreements with Algerian state-owned Sonatrach.
The first is a five year contract providing a range of multi-discipline engineering design and procurement services in support of the company’s upstream hydrocarbon development programme.
The company said the contract will cover the early definition of new projects, detailed engineering and services in support of project execution.
Algeria will press ahead with its $90 billion investment plan in the North African country’s oil and gas industry even with crude prices trading near five-year lows, said the head of state-run energy producer Sonatrach.
Sonatrach will invest $22 billion in natural-gas field development as part of the $90 billion program for 2015-19, said Sahnoun, the company’s interim chief executive officer, said at the North Africa Oil & Gas Summit conference in Algiers yesterday.
Oil prices have declined about 40% from a June peak amid overproduction and slower demand growth.
Brent crude ended last week at $69.07 a barrel.
