Saudi minister not worried about Covid variant: Update

Adds Russia's Novak comments in paragraphs 3 & 5, WHO comment in paragraph 6

Saudi Arabia's energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said today he is not worried about the new Covid-19 variant, known as Omicron, and Russia warned against Opec+ being too hasty in its response to that or to the recent agreement on a crude stocks release.

According to the semi-official Alarabiya news, Prince Abdulaziz offered no comment on Opec+ production plans ahead of this week's ministerial meeting, but his expression of a lack of concern indicates likely Saudi support for the alliance's programme of gradually increasing output on a monthly basis by 400,000 b/d.

Russian deputy prime minister Alexander Novak said Opec+ needs "to look at how the situation develops, we need to monitor the market closely. There should be no hasty decisions."

To give itself more time, and in light of the steep fall in crude futures prices on the final trading day of last week, Opec+ has tweaked the schedule for this week's virtual meetings. The combined group's Joint Technical Committee (JTC) will now meet on 1 December, the same day as Opec ministers, and the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) and Opec+ ministers will meet the following day. The JTC and JMMC were to meet today and tomorrow, respectively.

"We will have an additional discussion with Opec+ countries on the market situation and the need of [any] measures. As we want to work on it in detail, the JMMC meeting was moved [to a later date], so that we get more information about current events, including the new variant of the virus," Novak said.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) said the Omicron variant poses a "very high" global risk and is likely to spread further, as more countries move to reimpose travel restrictions, but said it was not yet known if the variant is associated with higher risks of transmission, reinfection and vaccine evasion.

Along with the Omicron variant, the Opec+ meetings will consider the supply pushback from key consumer nations. The US and others said they will release crude from strategic reserves to combat high prices. Opec+ ministers have already flagged potential seasonal stockbuilds in the first quarter, and the group can pause its scheduled increases for up to three months if market conditions warrant it.

Front-month Ice Brent crude futures were higher by around 5.6pc today, retracing around half of the drop from the previous trading session.

By Samira Kawar and Anastasia Krasinskaya