ABSTRACT
The events of 1979–1980 already seem like ancient history to OPEC’s members. These were the years when its Long-Term Strategy Committee laboured to produce a formula for achieving predictable quarterly rises in the price of crude oil. The conservative Gulf states did agree to coordinate limited production cutbacks in the period immediately preceding the fall of the Shah, but the Shah’s fall meant that the agreement was never tested. Certainly, a loose agreement made at OPEC’s March 1982 Vienna meeting to share a notional OPEC total of 17.5 million b/d had virtually no impact on individual members’ production and pricing policies. There are two other considerations facing OPEC when it seeks to make any prorationing agreement stick. First, it must somehow keep the increasingly important non-OPEC oil producers in line. Second, it may even have to consider influencing price developments in non-oil energies such as gas and coal.
