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The meeting was also attended by Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak on the Russian side and Director of the OPEC Research Division Ayed Al-Qahtani on the OPEC side.

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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Secretary General, allow me to cordially welcome you to St Petersburg.

I am aware that this is not your first visit as you used to take part in the events of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum before, but it is your first time here in your new capacity.

I want to note that we have not just good but very business-like relations with OPEC, we are working together. In this connection I would like to point out the depoliticised nature of OPEC activities aimed at safeguarding the interests of energy producers and also ensuring stability of global energy markets. By doing so, OPEC, currently under your leadership, is making a big and solid contribution to the stability of the global economy.

We agree with your forecasts that demand for energy resources and oil will undoubtedly remain high. (Addressing Alexander Novak.) How much is it, 105?

Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak: Now it stands at 103.5, and in future we will reach 105 million barrels per day.

Vladimir Putin: This is how it will remain in the nearest future. We also agree with these estimates.

By the way, we largely relied on your expert assessments when we were determining the strategy for Russia’s development, the strategy for the development of our energy sector.

We are ready to continue our cooperation further. I know that you have invited Mr Novak for the next session in Vienna. For our part, we would be happy to see you at the traditional Russian Energy Week in Moscow. The event is scheduled, as per tradition, for October.

I am very glad to see you and have the opportunity to share thoughts and opinions on how our collaboration as well as the situation in the global energy markets will be developing during these hard times, to put it bluntly.

Welcome.

OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais: It is a great honour to be able to see you for the first time. Even before becoming Secretary General of OPEC, I have always held very high respect to you and admiration to you as the President of the Russian Federation and what you do on the global stage.

And coming from a friendly country, the State of Kuwait, our leadership, as you know, also has a great admiration to Your Excellency and to the Russian Federation.

In terms of OPEC+ and the cooperation we have with OPEC+, I would like to, on behalf of the organisation and our member countries, express our gratitude and sincere thanks to you personally, Mr President, and to your able minister, Deputy Prime Minister Novak, who has been supporting us and preserving the stability of the market through some of the most difficult times in the past years.

The cooperation with the Russian Federation has been outstanding at all levels: on the technical level but also on the ministerial level, between His Excellency, my brother — I call him my brother, by the way, my Russian brother, Mr Novak, with all the ministers in OPEC. So, we thank you, your excellency, for your guidance and your leadership in that front.

For us, I am very happy to hear from Your Excellency the first word you mentioned about the depoliticisation of OPEC. Indeed, Your Excellency, this is one of our primary and key noble objectives that we want to depoliticise oil as a commodity and depoliticise the organisation.

Because this organisation is responsible for providing thirty percent of the global energy mix, which is oil. Even our forecast out to 2050, the year 2050, we still foresee that oil will dominate thirty percent of the energy mix.

And that is why at OPEC and, with the support of the Russian Federation to preserve the stability in the market and the balance, we will incentivise investments, which are required for the future demand for oil, which we see growing from this year, now we see it at 105 million barrels per day, in 2050 we see it reaching over a hundred and twenty million barrels per day. Which is significant growth, for many reasons. 

(Introduces a participant in the conversation.) This is the Director of Research, here with me, Dr Al-Qahtani. He is heading all our research, and I really appreciate, Your Excellency, that you are paying a lot of attention to the forecast done by our organisation. This means a lot to us that Russia considers this very seriously. We are very much – this is a responsibility on my shoulder and my team since we hear it from you Mr President that you really value the research we are doing and the forecast we are doing.

One of the key things I would like to share with Your Excellency is that we have always removed ideology out of our forecasting. Unlike some of the other western agencies that put ideology into their numbers and they cook, if I may use the term, they cook the numbers. We do not do that in OPEC.

These people here, they work very hard.

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