Saudi Arabia

Oil prices at a 4-year low: Decoding why Saudi Arabia won’t mind low prices for some time

oil

Vivek Kaul 

Oil prices have fallen to a four year low. As I write this the price of Brent crude oil stands at $82.82 per barrel, down 30% from June 2014.
The latest drop in price has come after Saudi Arabia, the biggest producer of oil within the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries(OPEC), the global oil cartel, decided to cut the price at which it sold oil to the United States by roughly 45 cents to a barrel. At the same time it increased the price to customers in Europe and Asia, for the first time in five months.
The theory going around for sometime has been that Saudi Arabia needs the price of oil to be at least at $83-84 per barrel to balance its budget. Hence, it won’t allow the price of oil to fall below that level. But that as we have seen hasn’t turned out to be the case with the price of Brent crude now less than $83 per barrel.
So, the question is why is Saudi Arabia allowing the price of oil to fall and taking a hit on its income? On many past occasions, the country has cut production when the price of oil is falling. This has helped the country prevent a fall in the price of oil.
As analysts at Merrill Lynch write in a recent report titled Does Saudi Want $85 oil “Our analysis suggests that since 2008, on average, a 10% drop in oil prices has historically led to a 1.5% reduction in Saudi production 3 months later, rising to 2% after 6 months.” Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem to be doing that this time around.
So what has changed? In 2013, United States became the largest producer of oil in the world, displacing Saudi Arabia. The shale oil fields of the United States are producing a lot of oil, and this has helped the country to become the largest producer of oil in the world. This has led to American imports of oil from Saudi Arabia coming down. Data from the US Energy Information Administration tells us that the imports from Saudi Arabia comprised of around 4.6% of total US oil consumption in August 2014. This is down from 7% in August 2013.
In fact, over the last two months, American imports of oil from Saudi Arabia have fallen under one million barrels per day, against 1.4 million barrels earlier. If one looks at the data over a longer period the situation looks even more grim. Over a period of last six years, the production of oil in the United States has increased by 70%. This has led to the reduction of oil imports from OPEC by half. Saudi Arabia is the biggest producer of oil within OPEC.
Saudi Arabia is trying to set this situation right. Shale oil is expensive to produce. Given this, it is viable for companies to produce oil, only if the price of oil remains at a certain level. As the Merrill Lynch analysts point out “With production costs ranging from $50 to $75/bbl at the well head, a decline in Brent crude oil prices to $85 would likely be a major blow to US shale oil players and lead to a significant slowdown in investment.”
Hence, Saudi Arabia is trying to make the production of shale oil unviable for companies which produce shale oil, by driving down the price of oil. The question is how long can the Saudis keep driving the price of oil?
Loren Steffy writing for Forbes.com points out that “The Saudis appear willing to use the abundance of U.S. production to allow prices to keep sliding, enabling the kingdom, which can profit from oil at as little as $30 a barrel, to grab a larger share of the global market.”
While the cost of production of oil in Saudi Arabia maybe low, there are other costs that need to be taken into account. David Strahan in his book The Last Oil Shock explains that that over the years in Saudi Arabia is that as oil prices have gone up, the rulers have been able to run one of the most lavish welfare systems in the world. This has helped them buy political legitimacy and the support of its citizens. For a very long time, the citizens of Saudi Arabia paid no tax, yet had access to free healthcare and education. At the same time, housing, electricity, food and fuel were subsidized. All this was possible because of all the money that was being earned by selling oil. And that is why for Saudi Arabia to balance its budget (i.e. the expenditure of the government is equal to its income), it needs to sell oil at a price of $83-84 per barrel.
Given this, will the Saudis start cutting production and pushing the price of oil up? “Much has been written recently about the marginal costs of production of crude oil, and how much which nation will “hurt” if West Texas Intermediate oil prices fell below the US$ 80 mark,” says Vijay L Bhambwani, CEO of BSPLIndia.com. West Texas Intermediate is the American oil benchmark and is currently at $77.2 per barrel.
Nevertheless, as long as long as Ghawar, Safania, Shayba, Abqaiq, Berri, Manifa, Abu Safah, Faroozan oil fields are viable, Saudis can sustain even lower prices, feels Bhambwani. At the same time, the fact that Aramco (officially known as Saudi Arabian Oil Company) has deep pockets is a point worth remembering. “Saudis can produce low cost arab light sweet crude very cost efficiently and only the recent state welfare schemes implemented after the arab spring, have raised the marginal costs. Even a slight rollback / delayed released of the additional welfare payments (US $ 36 billion) can add sizeable cash flow into the Saudi national balance sheet and give it additional staying power,” adds Bhambwani.
Also, it is worth remembering that the Saudi central bank has reserves worth $734.7 billion. Further, as Edward Chow a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington, recently told Bloomberg “The Saudis ran deficits from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s and may be prepared to do so again.”
What this tells us is that the Saudis can easily sustain low oil prices in the short-term, if they are looking to break the backs of the shale oil companies. At the same time low oil prices will hurt Iran, much to the delight of the Saudins.
To conclude, any fall in price of oil, will benefit India, and help the government further control its fiscal deficit. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends. So, India should hope that Saudi Arabia continues with its current strategy of driving down the price of oil.

The column appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on Nov 6, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

Oil prices are at a 4 year-low now but assuming that they will continue to fall is risky business

 oil

Vivek Kaul

Oil prices have been falling for a while now and have now touched a four year low. As per the data published by the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell, the price of the Indian basket of crude oil touched $ 82.83 per barrel on October 16, 2014.
There are several reasons for the fall (You can read about them in detail here and here). Analysts expect this growth to continue to fall in the years to come. Several fundamental reasons have been offered as an explanation for the same.
As Crisil Research points out in a research report titled Falling crude, LNG, coal prices huge positive for India “Over the next five years, we expect global oil demand to increase by 4-4.5 million barrels per day (mbpd). However, crude oil supply is expected to increase by 8-10 mbpd. This, we believe, will bring down prices from current levels.”
This augurs well for India as falling oil prices will ensure that the under-recoveries suffered by the oil marketing companies(OMCs) on selling diesel, cooking gas and kerosene, will fall. The government has been compensating the OMCs for these under-recoveries. Falling under-recover will mean lower government expenditure leading to a lower fiscal deficit. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends.
Analysts Harshad Katkar and Amit Murarka of Deutsche Bank Markets Research in a report titled Breaking Free point out that “Fuel subsidy could fall to an annual level of $7billion – a 70% reduction over financial year 2014 – by financial year 2020 and potentially reduce the government’s fuel subsidy burden to zero by 2021 driven by elimination of the diesel subsidy and rationalization of the cooking fuel subsidy.”
These arguments sound pretty good. The only problem is that predictions on which direction oil prices are headed invovle too many variables and predicting all these variables at the same time is not an easy thing to do.
On several occasions in the past, well renowned experts have ended up with eggs on their face while trying to predict the price of oil. In January 1974, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised the price of oil to $11.65 per barrel. This was after OPEC’s economic commission had determined that the price of oil should be $17 per barrel.
It was around then that the economist Milton Friedman wrote in a column in the Newsweek magazine where he predicted that “the Arabs … could not for long keep the price of crude at $10 a barrel.”
By early 1981, the price of oil had risen to $40 a barrel. A spate of reasons including the politics of the Middle East were responsible for this rise. Other than the politics of the Middle East, in April 1977, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States had come up with a highly influential report which predicted that the growth of the world oil demand would soon outpace production.
This was primarily because of constraints on the OPEC production. The Soviet Union, another big oil producer, would reach its peak soon. This meant that by the mid-1980s, oil would become very scarce and expensive, the report pointed out.
Customers, including some of the biggest international oil companies, were queuing up to buy oil. The report succeeded in generating sufficient paranoia among the oil-consuming nations as well as the big oil-producing companies. Hence, they wanted to buy as much oil as they could.
All the doomsday predictions regarding the price of oil turned out to be wrong. By 1983, the average OPEC price had fallen to $28 per barrel leading to some members of OPEC offering additional hidden discounts in an attempt to boost their stagnating sales.
By 1986, the price of oil was quoting again at $10 a barrel, proving the CIA prediction to be all wrong. Milton Friedman, though, was right about the price in the end. And Friedman would write a “I told you so” column in Newsweek which appeared on March 10, 1986, titled “Right at Last, an Expert’s Dream.” This, of course, was in jest. As Friedman confessed, “Timing, as well as direction, is important…I had expected the price of oil to come down far sooner.”
What this tells us is that it is very difficult to predict the long term direction of the price of oil. One reason why oil prices have not risen in the recent past despite the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is because the outfit has not been able to move into the southern part of Iraq where a major part of the country’s oil is produced. Southern Iraq is dominated by the Shias who do not support the ISIS.
Then there is the so called deal between Saudi Arabia and the United States, where the ruling dynasty of Saudi Arabia is believed to have engineered a fall in the price of oil so as to ensure that the security guarantee that they have from the United States, continues.
The trouble is that with the price of oil now lower than $85 a barrel, the shale oil boom that is happening in the United States and Canada, might not be able to continue. Shale oil is expensive to produce and it is financially viable only if the price of oil remains at a certain level. As analysts of Bank of America-Merrill Lynch point out in a report titled Does Saudi want $85 oil? “With production costs ranging from $50 to $75/bbl at the well head, a decline in Brent crude oil prices to $85 would likely be a major blow to US shale oil players and lead to a significant slowdown in investment.”
The shale oil boom can lead to a situation where the United States no longer needs to depend on the Middle East and other countries to meet its oil needs. Hence, to some extent it is in the interest of the United States that oil prices continue to fall. At the same time, one reason that dollar continues to be the international reserve currency is because oil continues to be bought and sold in dollars.
Saudi Arabia over the years has cracked the whip among the OPEC nations to maintain a status quo on this front. It is in the interest of the United States that the dollar continues to be the international reserve currency. While every country in the world needs to earn dollars, the United States can simply print them.
And to ensure that dollar continues to be a reserve currency, the United States, needs Saudi Arabia on its side. The Saudis currently would prefer a lower price of oil, in order to make the production of shale oil unviable. At the same time they would like the security guarantee they have from the United States to continue, in order to protect them against the ISIS.
As the Bank of America-Morgan Stanely analysts point out “It should perhaps not come as a surprise that the threat of a stateless group that challenges the status quo by attempting to redraw national borders is shifting incentives for key regional and global players…The Islamic State could present a direct threat to the Arab monarchies at a time of growing social discontent…In our view, Saudi and other regional rulers may prefer to re-engage the US to help protect established borders from the expanding caliphate. What could Arab countries offer the West to help contain this threat? Lower oil prices.”
This issue is too complex to make a prediction on. Nevertheless it will have a huge impact on the direction in which oil prices will go in the years to come. Further, the chances of the current turmoil in the Middle East escalating, still remain. As Milton Ezrati writes in a piece titled ISIS, Oil, and the Economy on Huffington Post “There is no mistaking the huge remaining importance of Persian Gulf supplies. If the turmoil there were to take a significant portion of this output off line suddenly, the world would be hard pressed to replace it, and prices would rise with all their ill effects.”
He further points out that “the Persian Gulf itself is also a choke point of no small significance in oil transport. The EIA reports that upwards of 35 percent of sea going oil and gas passes through the Gulf and the narrow Strait of Hormuz at its head. If Iran were to become further embroiled in Iraq’s problems or otherwise come to a confrontation with Western powers, the strait would close and the world would find itself without any of this still crucial supply.”
The price of oil is not just determined by the demand and supply equation. The politics of the Middle East and which side of the bed Uncle Sam wakes up from remain very important factors. For any analyst trying to predict the price of oil, taking all these “qualitative” factors into account remains very difficult.
To conclude, what are the lessons that we can draw from this. First and foremost we need to ensure that the price of diesel is decontrolled. And more than that we need to ensure that it continues to be decontrolled in the years to come, even if the global price of oil rises.

The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on Oct 18, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

Death by oil: Why US and Saudi Arabia are colluding to drive down the price of oil

oil

Vivek Kaul

Oil prices have been coming down since the middle of this year. There are several reasons for the same, as I explained in a piece yesterday. One reason being suggested is that it is in the interest of both the United States as well as Saudi Arabia that oil prices go lower than they currently are. Further, these countries might even be colluding to ensure that oil prices are driven lower.
Before we get into the details, it is important to discuss some history here. At the end of the Second World War, the American President Franklin Roosevelt realised that a regular supply of oil was very important for the well being of America and the evolving American way of life. He travelled quietly to USS Quincy, a ship anchored in the Red Sea. Here he was met by King Ibn Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia, which was by then home to the biggest oil reserves in the world.
The United States’ obsession with the automobile had led to a swift decline in domestic reserves, even though America was the biggest producer of oil in the world at that point of time. The country needed to secure another source of assured supply of oil. Hence, in return for access to oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, King Ibn Sa’ud was promised full American military support to the ruling clan of Sa’ud.
Over the years, Saudi Arabia has also ensured that Organization of Petroleum Exporting (OPEC) continues to price oil in US dollars. This has been a major reason behind the American dollar continuing to be the international reserve currency. Given this, the United States and Saudi Arabia have always had a close relationship which has proven beneficial to both the countries.
The recent past has seen the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) which is trying to redraw political boundaries in the Middle East. As analysts of Bank of America-Merrill Lynch points out in a report titled Does Saudi want $85 oil? “Recent advances by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq have disrupted Middle East politics. The Islamic State aspires to bring any areas where Muslims live under its control…[It] rejects political divisions established by Western powers at the end of World War I.”
This scenario has led to a situation where Saudi Arabia is cooperating with the United States to keep oil prices down. Typically, oil prices start to rise at the sign of the slightest trouble in the Middle East. Nevertheless, that hasn’t happened this time around. The major reason for the same is that the ruling clan of the Sa’uds wants the United States to keep the security guarantee that Roosevelt gave them, going. In fact, in September before addressing the United States on the threat of ISIS, President Barack Obama is supposed to have called up Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
The ISIS has captured oilfields in Syria and Iraq. This oil is sold at a discount to the world price of oil, to Turkey, which in turn, resells it in Europe. It is estimated that ISIS earns around $3 million from oil sales. By driving down price this earning can be driven down as well. Hence, United States and Saudi Arabia can ensure that they are able to cut down the funding of ISIS.
And how is this being done? Typically, whenever oil prices start to fall, Saudi Arabia starts to cut down on production, so that oil supply comes down, and this immediately slows down the fall in price. But that doesn’t seem to have happened this time around. As the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch analysts point out “We have yet to see a Saudi output cut in response the lower prices. Oil has fallen $15/bbl[barrel] from a peak of $115/bbl in mid-June, but Saudi production has not bulged.”
This has helped keep oil prices down. The threat is that ISIS might want to go beyond Syria and Iraq in the days to come. “It should perhaps not come as a surprise that the threat of a stateless group that challenges the status quo by attempting to redraw national borders is shifting incentives for key regional and global players…The Islamic State could present a direct threat to the Arab monarchies at a time of growing social discontent…In our view, Saudi and other regional rulers may prefer to reengage the US to help protect established borders from the expanding caliphate. What could Arab countries offer the West to help contain this threat? Lower oil prices,” the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch analysts point out.
An interesting comparison to this situation is the time when Iraq attacked Kuwait more than twenty years back. As Thomas Piketty writes in Capital in the Twenty-First Century: “If the United States, backed by other Western powers had not driven the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq would probably have threatened Saudi Arabia’s oil fields next, and it is possible that other countries in the region, such as Iran, would have joined the fray to redistribute the region’s petroleum rents.”
This explains very well, why Saudi Arabia needs the security guarantee from the United States, and in return it is offering a lower price of oil. A lower oil price also helps the United States and other western powers neutralize Russia, which in 2013 was the biggest producer of oil in the world, having produced 13.28% of the oil being produced globally.
There are other political factors at work as well. The Kurds have been demanding autonomy from Iraq and are being allowed to sell oil at a lower price. As Vijay Bhambwani, CEO of BSPLIndia.com explains “The Kurds have started selling high quality arab light grade sweet crude at US$ 55 / barrel. Initial despatches were to Israel. Since the Kurds have a militia of 55,000 strong fighters (Peshmerga) which is funded by oil sales, the western countries are allowing the Kurds to sell their oil below market prices in return for fighting the ISIS forces.”
Over and above this, there is the case of Iraqi cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr, son of the slain chief cleric of Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s rule. As Bhambwani explains “Al-Sadr is the founder / commander of the Mehdi army which is dominated by Shias and is pro Iran. If he seizes power, he is likely to re-negotiate oil contracts with the west, keeping the Saudis on tenterhooks. Saudis are therefore open to hiking output and cutting prices.”
In fact, by cutting the price of oil, the Saudis also hope to neutralize the shale oil boom in the United States and Canada. This boom has led to the United States and Canada producing much more oil than they were a few years back. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that United States in 2013 produced 12.35 million barrels per day. This is a massive increase of 35% since 2009. In case of Canada the production has gone up by 22.8% to 4.07 million barrels per day between 2009 to 2013.
But shale oil is expensive to produce and it is financially viable only if oil price remain at a certain level. As Bank of America-Merrill Lynch analysts point out “With production costs ranging from $50 to $75/bbl at the well head, a decline in Brent crude oil prices to $85 would likely be a major blow to US shale oil players and lead to a significant slowdown in investment.”
In the end, there is enough evidence to conclude that Saudi Arabia has been working towards pushing down the price of oil, in order to ensure that the United States security guarantee continues.
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on Oct 8, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

Why oil prices are falling despite the rise of ISIS

oil

Vivek Kaul

All other things staying the same, oil prices have always been inversely proportional to peace in the Middle East. The moment any tension or war breaks out in the Middle East, oil prices start rising. The logic is pretty straight forward given that the region has some of the biggest oil fields in the world and produces bulk of the oil that the world consumes.
Any tension is seen as a threat to supply of oil in the future, and taking that possibility into account, oil prices start to go up.
But this theory doesn’t seem to be working in the recent past. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has been waging a war in the region for a while now, but oil prices instead of going up, have been coming down. The international crude oil price of Indian Basket as on September 30, 2014, stood at $ 95.34 per barrel (bbl). The price must have fallen more since then, but no new data has been released given that the government has been on a five day holiday.
The brent crude oil is currently trading at around $92.8 per barrel. This is a fall of more than 19% since June 2014. The more ISIS has grown stronger in the Middle East, the more oil prices have fallen.
How does one explain this dichotomy? There are multiple reasons behind this. ISIS has managed to capture the largest oilfield in Syria and now controls 60% of the oil production in the country. Nevertheless this has had no impact on the price of oil globally. The reason for this is straightforward. Syria is the 32nd largest producer of oil in the world and in 2013 produced only 0.48% of the oil produced globally.
ISIS has also managed to take over a number of oil fields in Iraq. But they haven’t been able to move into the Southern part of the country where the majority of the oilfields are located. Iraq is the seventh largest producer of oil in the world and in 2013 produced around 3.75% of global oil. Hence, any disruption of oil supply in Iraq will have some impact on global prices. But that hasn’t happened.
As Crisil Research explains in a research report titled Falling crude, LNG, coal prices huge positive for India “This is because the likelihood of Islamic State progressing towards southern Iraq, which has about 65-70% of the country’s oil production and reserves, seems minimal. For one, that part of Iraq is dominated by Shia Muslims who do not support Islamic State.”
Further, ISIS also needs money to keep running their operations. And that means that they need to keep pumping oil out of the oilfields that they have captured. The oil is sold at a discount to the world price of oil, to Turkey, which in turn, resells it in Europe. This is another reason why oil prices haven’t risen. The supply from the captured oilfields is still hitting the world market.
Over and above this, the oil supply from Libya is coming back. A newsreport points out that Libya is pumping close to 925,000 barrels of oil per day. This has been the highest since Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown from power in Libya. Libya in 2013 produced around 0.85% of global oil production. These are the short term reasons as to why the price of oil hasn’t gone up, despite the advance of the ISIS.
There are several long term reasons as well. The United States and Canada are producing much more oil than they were a few years back. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that United States in 2013 produced 12.35 million barrels per day. This is a massive increase of 35% since 2009. A recent report in the www.businessinsider.com points out that “In 2010 the [United States] still imported half of the crude it consumed, but the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts that will fall to little more than 20 percent next year.”
In case of Canada the production has gone up by 22.8% to 4.07 million barrels per day between 2009 to 2013. This massive increase in oil production has come from a boom in shale oil output. As a recent report in the Financial Times pointed out “Booming shale oil output has pushed US production to a 28-year high at the expense of imports.”
This has led to a situation where the United States has stopped importing oil from countries it was doing earlier. Take the case of Nigeria. The country did not import a single barrel of oil to the United States in July 2014. The country till four years back was one of the top 5 exporters of oil to the United States.
In fact as a October 2 blog on the Financial Times website points out “At its peak in February 2006, the US imported 1.3m b/d from Nigeria – equal to roughly one super-tanker the size of the Exxon Valdez every day. By 2012, Nigeria was already selling just 0.5m b/d, but was still one of the top-5 suppliers to the US, alongside Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico and Venezuela.”
Columbian oil exports to the United States have also fallen by a one third up to July this year, in comparison to the same period last year.
All this oil which was going to the United States earlier is now hitting the world market and is a major reason why oil prices have not rallied in the recent past. Interestingly, the US production of oil is now more than one third of the oil being produced in the Middle East. All this has had a huge impact on oil prices given that the United States is the biggest consumer of oil in the world.
Higher supplies from Iran are also expected to hit the market. Currently the country is facing international sanctions and is not allowed to sell a major portion of the oil that it produces. In 2013, Iran produced 4.77% of the total global oil production and was the fourth largest producer of oil in the world. As Crisil Research points out “In case of Iran, production is expected to return to the pre-sanctions levels of 4.4 mbpd from current levels of 3.1 mbpd as Iran is expected to co-operate with the international community after the change of regime post-elections.”
This is expected to happen because over the last two years international sanctions have had a severe impact on Iran. “In 2012 and 2013, Iran’s GDP registered a negative growth, inflation rose more than 60% cumulatively, and Iranian Rial depreciated by more than 85% cumulatively. Since Iran’s economy is oil-dependent, with oil exports contributing to ~85% of total exports, it will have to increase its oil exports to repair its economy,” Crisil research points out.
All these reasons, along with the fact that China’s economic growth is slowing down have ensured that oil prices haven’t gone up in the recent past. China is the second largest consumer of oil in the world after the United States.
In the recent past several analysts have suggested that Saudi Arabia and United States are working together to drive down the price of oil. This is being done to cut off the funding of ISIS. As oil prices fall, the price at which ISIS will have to sell oil will fall further. And that way, they amount of money they earn will come down. The question that needs to be answered is that how much truth does this theory have. I will try and answer that in the next piece. Watch this space.
The article originally appeared on www.FirstBiz.com on Oct 7, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

Why Moily’s idea of buying oil from Iran won’t work

M-Veerappa-Moily_0Vivek Kaul
India is thinking of importing more oil from Iran than it currently does. In a letter to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, oil minister Veerapa Moily, suggested that “An additional import of 11 million tonnes during 2013/14 would result in reduction in forex outflow by $8.47 billion (considering the international price of crude oil at $105 per barrel).” (As reported by Reuters).
This is because Iran accepts payments in rupees and not dollars as is the case with most of the other oil exporters. This will help India save precious foreign exchange.
While theoretically this idea makes immense sense, it is not really a solution that India will be able to execute. The United States and the European Union have placed sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme. As Reuters reports “U.S. and EU sanctions placed on Iran over its nuclear programme have reduced its oil exports more than half from pre-sanction levels of about 2.2 million barrels per day (bpd). In the first half of 2013, imports of Iranian oil from its four biggest buyers – China, India, Japan and South Korea – fell more than a fifth from a year ago to around 960,000 bpd.”
India’s oil imports from Iran have declined by 46% to 185,700 barrels per day during the first seven months of the year, in comparison to the same period last year. And this is because of the sanctions.
Oil is bought and sold internationally in dollars. This started sometime after the Second World War. President Franklin D Roosevelt realised that a regular supply of oil was very important for the well being of America or what came to be known as the great “American dream”.
After the end of the Second World War Roosevelt travelled quietly to USS Quincy, a ship anchored in the Red Sea. Here he was met by King Ibn Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia, a country, which was by then home to the biggest oil reserves in the world.
The obsession of the Untied States with the automobile had led to a swift decline in domestic reserves, even though America was the biggest producer of oil in the world at that point of time. The country needed to secure another source of assured supply of oil. So in return for access to oil reserves of Saudi Arabia, King Ibn Sa’ud was promised full American military support to the ruling clan of Sa’ud. This oil was sold in dollars.
This was one of the major reasons behind the dollar becoming the international reserve currency. Every country in the world needed oil. And for countries that did not produce enough of their own oil they needed dollars they could use to buy oil from other countries.
This continued till the 1970s. In the seventies, after the end of the gold standard, the dollar started to lose value rapidly against other currencies and against gold. This meant that the purchasing power of the OPEC countries which sold oil in dollars and then used those dollars to import goods they did not produce, came down dramatically.
As William Greider writes in Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country “The dollar had already lost one-third of its value in only half a dozen years and seemed headed toward even steeper decline… Oil trades worldwide in dollars and if the U.S. was going to permit a free fall in the dollar’s value, that meant the oil-producing nations would received less and less real value for their commodity.”
One impact of this was OPEC countries raising the price of oil. Another impact was that some of the OPEC countries wanted to price oil in several currencies rather than just the American dollar. Jahangir Amuzegar, who was an economist by training, and had been a minister in the government of Iran, as well as a negotiator for OPEC, outlined some of these proposals in a 1978 article. In this article he outlined several currency combinations that could be used to price oil. Iraq, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela were in support of this plan.
The idea was not to be dependent on one currency, but a number of currencies and hence iron out any fluctuations in the value of one currency. Moving to a basket of currencies at that point of time clearly made sense for OPEC as far as future revenues were concerned.
As per estimates of the US department of treasury, Saudi Arabia, the largest member of OPEC, would have been better off if it had priced oil in a basket of currencies instead of the dollar, in all but 18 months since 1973.
So what was stopping Saudi Arabia and OPEC from moving to pricing oil in a basket of currencies rather than the dollar? As David E Spiro writes in The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets: “The Saudis, however, had the greatest proportion of dollar-denominated reserves in OPEC. This means that their reserves were diminished by the depreciation of the dollar (compared to the basket of their imports). But it also meant that they had the most to lose if a shift by OPEC to a basket of currencies threatened international confidence in the dollar. Having agreed to invest so much in dollars, the Saudis now shared a stake in maintaining the dollar as an international reserve currency. On the one hand dollars constituted 90% of Saudi government revenues in 1979, and those revenues were subject to the same fluctuations as the dollar. On the other hand, the Saudi investments were, roughly at same time 83% dollar denominated. The choice was whether to stabilise current revenues threatening the worth of all the past revenues (since invested in dollar assets).”
Also, as mentioned earlier, Roosevelt had stuck a deal with the ruling clan of Al Sa’uds. It is important to remember that the American security guarantee made by President Roosevelt after the Second World War was extended not to the people of Saudia Arabia nor to the government of Saudi Arabia but to the ruling clan of Al Sa’uds. So they had an intrest in selling oil in dollars and keeping the dollar going as an international reserve currency.
Also other than being the largest producer of oil Saudi Arabia also had the largest reserves among all OPEC countries. It had 39% of the proven OPEC reserves. Within OPEC it had the almost unquestioned support of what were known as the sheikhdom states of Bahrain, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Qatar. These countries faced threats from other OPEC members like Iraq and Iran. For many years, Iraq had been eyeing Kuwait. It had tried to annex Kuwait in 1961 (and then again in the early 1990s).
Hence, the support of Saudi Arabia, the largest nation in the region, was important for them. If we added the reserves and production of the sheikdom countries which supported Saudi Arabia, they were together responsible for 50% of OPEC’s production and owned nearly 61% of its proven reserves. So, when Saudi Arabia made the decision that OPEC oil would be continued to be priced in dollars, there wasn’t much option for the other OPEC members but to follow what the largest member had decided.
What this brief history of oil tells us is that for dollar to continue being an international reserve currency, it is very important that oil continues to be sold in dollars. Other countries need to earn these dollars whereas the United States has the exorbitant privelege of simply printing them and spending them.
Iran has been trying to challenge this hegemoney of the dollar for a while now. It has been trying to move the buying and selling of oil away from the US dollar. In late 2007, Iran claimed to have moved all of its oil sales to non dollar currencies, with most of it being sold in euros and a small part in yen. There were no independent reports confirming the same.
The United States and Iran have been at each other’s throats since the 1979 revolution in Iran which overthrew the King. Lately there has been tension because of Iran’s nuclear programme.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was the President of Iran till around a month back, has called the dollar “a worthless piece of paper”. News reports suggest that Iran has started accepting renminbi from China and rubles from Russia in lieu of the oil that it exports to these countries.
In fact in a November 2007, summit of OPEC, Iran had suggested that OPEC oil should be sold in a basket of currencies rather than the American dollar. But it did not get the support of other members except Venezuela. Hugo Chavez, the late President of Venezuela, was known to be a vocal critic of the United States. 
On February 17,2008, Iran set up the Iranian Oil Bourse, for the trading of petroleum, petrochemicals and natural gas, in currencies other than dollar, primarily the euro and the Iranian rial. But the exchange since inception has not traded in oil but products made out of oil which are used as a feedstock in pharmaceutical and plastic industries.
Reports in the Iranian press suggested that the bourse started trading oil in non dollar currencies from March 20,2012. India wanted to pay for Iranian oil, either in gold or in rupees. If India paid in rupees, Iran could use those rupees to import goods from India.
This move to pay for oil in rupees or gold was a clear attempt to undermine the dollar in the buying and selling of oil, something that keeps the dollar at the heart of the international financial system. Hence, great pressure was applied by America on India to stop its oil imports from Iran and source its needs from some other producer.
India’s oil imports from Iran in April 2012 fell by 34.2% to 269,000 barrels per day from 409,000 barrels per day in March 2012. The government of India asked the Indian oil refiners to cut Iranian oil imports and they obliged.
What this tells us in a very clear way is that even though the US dollar may not be in the best of shape, but any attempts to mess around with its international ‘currency’ status will not be taken lying down. And for dollar to maintain its international currency status it is important that oil continues to be bought and sold in dollars.
So if the United States could pressurise India into cutting down its oil purchases from Iran in March 2012, it can do the same in September 2013. Any move away from dollar , which in turn will undermine access to “easy money” which has been so important to what is now called the American way of life.
Also it is best to remember that financially America might be in a mess, but by and large it still remains the only superpower in the world. In 2010, the United States spent $698billion on defence. This was 43% of the global total.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on September 2, 2013 
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)