Behind The Oil War

The Russians may have started the price war, but the Saudis were waiting for the opportunity to jump in

- By Javier Blas

On March 4, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the 59-year-old Saudi oil minister, was locked down in his suite at the Park Hyatt hotel in Vienna, preparing for what would turn out to be the most important meeting of his life.

A veteran negotiator, the prince is skilled in the Byzantine diplomacy and backroom deals that have characterized OPEC since its founding 60 years ago. Few others can bridge the political enmities among oil producers, who often have little in common other than their addiction to petrodollars. It’s a world where a few barrels here or there in a production deal often make all the difference. “How can we work in dividing these things?” Prince Abdulaziz told Bloomberg TV last year. “It is not going to be a science. It’s science, art, and sensibility.”

But when Prince Abdulaziz met his Russian counterpart, Alexander Novak, that day at the OPEC building in Vienna, both science and art failed. The talks were the prelude to a seismic oil price decline that’s still reverberating through the global economy—a crash that may reshape the energy industry for decades to come. And what started as a price war may turn out to be a much more important strategic rethinking of Saudi oil production policy, as the kingdom seeks to monetize its giant petroleum reserves as fast as possible rather than shepherding that store of wealth through the generations. Such a shift would fundamentally change the economics of the industry, using Saudi Arabia’s ultralow cost advantages to win a race to the bottom. For Prince Abdulaziz’ younger halfbrother, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, it would represent a massive gamble: the world’s preeminent oil exporter choosing to live with lower long-term oil prices.