<article><p class="lead">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. </p><p>"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."</p><p>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 <a href="https://direct.argusmedia.com/newsandanalysis/article/2463390">formally denied</a> it had invited rising South American producer Guyana to be a member.</p><p>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." </p><p>"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."</p><p>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."</p><p class="bylines">By Aydin Calik, Bachar Halabi and Jon Mainwaring</p></article>
