Saudi Arabia welcomes US oil boom, official says

Reuters reports that the deputy oil minister of Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude exporter, said the kingdom isn’t worried about surging U.S. production.

“The world economy over the long term will need every contribution of every source of energy available,” Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman Bin Abdulaziz said, according to the news service. “The kingdom welcomes new resources of energy supplies, as they are needed.”

OPEC’s World Oil Outlook predicts demand for the cartel’s crude will drop in the next half-decade as non-OPEC supplies increase, Reuters notes.

The cartel is poised for an eventual resurgence after a period of declining market share, the International Energy Agency predicts in a separate forecast. E2-Wire wrote about that here.