Barbara Lewis

For more than four decades, OPEC occupied a grey building on the banks of the Danube Canal, a premises with which the press became wearily familiar during long nights of waiting for the ministers to agree to raise, lower or maintain oil output.
The old headquarters at Obere Donaustrasse 93 will be closed down from 1630 GMT on Nov. 25 and the organization is moving into its new Secretariat at Helferstorferstrasse 17 in Vienna’s first district.
OPEC hasn’t disclosed the cost of its new building, which is near the old stock exchange in a busy part of Vienna. Having acquired new members Angola and Ecuador and often inviting non-menbers to its meetings, the group needs more space.
The new and sparkly white building doesn’t have many windows and looks as if it could be short of parking space, but presumably OPEC has made arrangements that will avoid a line of black Mercs –- generally the oil ministers' favoured mode of transport – backing up as they try to drop off their delegates.
Reporters got to know the old building, known among the local press pack as The Dump, when working around the logistical challenges it presented to newsgathering. One spot, right by the door, was coveted as it was the best place to catch a minister at the end of the meeting to confirm OPEC's decision. The downside was having to stand there for hours, sustained only by coffee from the vending machine brought by a colleague.
For years, when entering the conference room for the pre-meeting news conference, indecorously known as the gang bang, they negotiated a tiny opening at the head of the horseshoe-shaped ministerial table. They then squeezed their way through, together with cameramen and photographers, to yell out questions at the ministers -– an experience closer to playing rugby than reporting.
To get to the conference room, they ran up four flights of stairs in a herd that sometimes resulted in reporters falling over or getting whacked by a camera.
Perhaps in the new premises, OPEC has made things even more of a challenge for the press, such as introducing Indiana Jones-style trapdoors and gigantic rolling rocks. Or maybe there will be a shorter flight of stairs and a wider gap, to facilitate news gathering?

If there is one thing OPEC Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri would really like to get rid of, it's analysts forecasts of how much oil there is sitting in storage in the world's biggest energy consumer the United States.
"The forecasts are always wrong," he has told Reuters. "Why do you carry on running them?"
He might have taken this week as a particularly fine example of how difficult it is to get it right.
Analysts polled by Reuters thought crude oil stocks would rise by 1.4 million barrels in the latest week. Instead, according to reports from the American Petroleum Institute and the Energy Information Administration, inventories fell, sending oil prices back up towards $81 a barrel on Wednesday.
No-one was heard complaining on the oil market, however. Instead, everyone there was busy trading on the surprise -- or in the view of the OPEC Secretary General driving the kind of speculation that needs to be kept firmly under control.

The physical oil market, where traders exchange barrels of oil or financial instruments derived from them, is transacted not on a trading floor or electronic exchange, but by phone, instant messaging and – although employers have clamped down on it -- the long liquid lunch.
Exactly, in other words, where regulators tend not to be looking. Instead, guidelines and indexes drawn up by the two main oil pricing agencies, Platts and Argus Media, serve as the de-facto rulebook for oil trading.
Argus announced a coup against Platts this week. The state oil company of top world exporter Saudi Arabia, Aramco, is switching to a crude benchmark index published by Argus to price its crude oil sales to the United States, from another benchmark published by Platts.
With a due sense of the gravity of its task, Argus issued a description of its index in a document labelled a white paper -- a term typically reserved for drafts laws issued by the British government.

The energy world gathered this week in London for the 30th annual edition of Oil and Money, a major industry event.
Some would say it is high time the conference had a title more in keeping with the prevailing political mood and the conference's official colour -- green.
But, for all the rising tide of rhetoric ahead of talks in Copenhagen in December to try to ensure a low-carbon future, high-carbon oil is still where a great deal of the money is.
If big business is shifting, the process is gradual and many have voiced scepticism about the chances of agreement in Copenhagen on how to follow up the Kyoto Protocol that expires in 2012.
Representatives of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries were particularly clear that the not-too-distant future was more black than green.
"There's no getting away from fossil fuels," Nigerian Oil Minister Rilwanu Lukman said on the sidelines of the industry conference.
"Biofuels will not work. You can't use your food to have energy," said OPEC Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri. He also ruled out nuclear power, which many in the energy industry regard as a low-carbon option.
"Nuclear energy is just waiting for a catastrophe," was Badri's view.
The heads of oil majors were more circumspect, but the message was not so very different.
Gas, they said, was very viable as a proven technology for power generation that emits far less carbon than coal, but it cannot meet the world's massive transportation needs.  BP's CEO Tony Hayward said the company worked on the assumption 80 percent of the world's energy needs would be provided by fossil fuel as far out as 2030.
By that measure, we could be set for another 30 editions of Oil and Money.

As the oil price raced towards its all-time high of nearly $150 hit in July last year, OPEC ministers were fast to blame speculators and back calls for regulation.
But like all the best politicians, they have the pragmatic right to change their tune when circumstances change.
And now U.S. authorities are spearheading the campaign for stricter rules, they don’t seem quite so sure regulation would be a good thing.
Algeria’s Energy and Mines Minister Chakib Khelil didn’t say so in so many words, but his elegant comments on the oil market’s new-found ability to carry on rising in defiance of high inventory levels implied he’d rather the regulators did not bring an abrupt end to the trend.
"If it is a correlation that reflects the new paradigm in the market, then it's not a major concern, unless you have more control of the financial investors that do speculation," he told Reuters.
A certain amount of speculation, it would seem, is a good thing.

The big question ahead of the expected arrival in Vienna of the new Iranian oil minister is which door will he use?
Iran’s oil ministers have had a long history of sneaking into the city's Intercontinental Hotel through the garage, theoretically to avoid the awaiting press.
In practice, journalists are always camped out in the basement, inhaling the fumes of limousines and honing questions to put to OPEC’s second biggest producer.
They also make their way up to the hotel’s executive floors, where the ministers tend to stay, as well as lurking in the lobby, where most officials make their entrance ahead of meetings of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The new Iranian Oil Minister Massoud Mirkazemi, formerly the country’s commerce minister and regarded as close to the president, could of course decide to say nothing at all regardless of how he gets into his hotel and how many reporters greet him.

Late-night discussions can take unusual turns – especially when those doing the talking are members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The group will at 9.30 pm on Wednesday assemble for what in theory should be a straightforward decision to keep existing supply targets intact, given that oil prices are still widely considered high enough to offset producer concerns about overly full inventories.
But past performance implies a surprise cannot be ruled out.
The last time OPEC scheduled a meeting at night was in September 2008 when the talks again took place during Ramadan and therefore could not begin until after the fast of the day and feast of the evening.
That meeting ended at about 3 a.m., later than scheduled, with a decision that left exhausted journalists in shock.
Instead of the simple no change or slight adjustment to output that might have been expected, the first minister to emerge announced to the attendant press the group had returned to its “Doha quotas”.
What on earth were they? He did not explain, although it was later revealed he was referring to a decision made a year earlier in the Qatari capital. Obvious really, except some sleepy attempts at calculation failed to get the output targets to tally.
Needless to say, the OPEC press pack is praying this year’s Ramadan meeting will be less of a challenge to sleep-starved journalists.

Every month the world's leading oil exporter Saudi Arabia sets official selling prices for its crude. It is an event of major importance for physical oil traders -- and, until very recently, of major dread for energy reporters.
For years, the Saudi prices were among the most difficult pieces of information to track down and relay in a timely and accurate fashion.
As if sensing that pain, Saudi state oil company Aramco in June started to issue the prices by email.
The relief for traders must also be considerable. They are no longer bombarded with the question "are the Saudi prices out yet?" and no longer saddled with the task of rattling out a long, complicated list of numbers, all too easy for a reporter to misreport.
Release by email should be more accurate, help to improve transparency in the oil market – and be smoother for all concerned.
Well, in theory. In July, Aramco emailed the August prices to Reuters correspondents in London, who were out of the office for the weekend, and not to those in Dubai, who were hard at work. The official release also omits a couple of the many prices -- but perhaps Aramco takes the view reporters should be left with something to do.

It can take years for organisations to get organised, if indeed they ever do. The oil producers’ club OPEC was founded in 1960, but only became a force to be reckoned with in the 1970s when the Arab oil embargo cut off supplies to the world’s biggest energy consumer the United States and oil prices rocketed.
The much less high profile Gas Exporting Countries’ Forum, which dates back to 2001, is still struggling to get its statutes in order.
Since last December it has had a charter. It has also commissioned reports and held irregular meetings.
The latest gathering took place this week in the sandy and very hot Qatari capital and agreed little. Notably, it failed to decide on one stand-out item on the modest agenda: who should be the group’s secretary general?
So far the only country to have submitted a candidate is Iran.
In the gas exporters’ club, Iran is the second biggest reserve holder after Russia, but on occasions has reneged on its export commitments, so it’s perhaps understandable the GECF decided to extend the application period.
Candidates now have until October to submit their C.V.s and the GECF should agree a secretary general at its next ministerial meeting, which takes place in December -- in theory. Before this week’s session, the GECF had last meet last December after repeated rescheduling.

From the start, "green shoots of recovery" was not necessarily the British government's wisest choice of words and after a few months of being on everyone's lips, has given way to a more lowly metaphor.
Business Minister Baroness Vadera raised the hackles of the political opposition in January when she spotted "a few green shoots" on a day of large-scale job losses and collapsing share prices.
Evidence of economic revival is still elusive, but there are ever louder hints that we have at least seen the worst -- or bottomed, to use the mot du jour.
Bottom as a noun and a verb was widely brandished by speakers attending Reuters Global Energy Summit this week, who based on their analysis on a slight increase in available credit, a tentative pick up in energy demand and rising commodity prices.
OPEC Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri has an interest in spotting the kind of confidence that has driven oil prices up from a low below $35 a barrel in December to almost double that.
"I have no doubt that the recession has bottomed out, but is it a V shape or a U shape?" he asked during a Reuters summit session.
Others were less convinced and the most bearish of them all was a representative of the very oversupplied tanker market, where freight rates have sunk to their lowest levels in decades, with not a green shoot in sight.
"We have seen lower than the bottom," said Erik Ranheim, a manager at oil tanker association Intertanko.