Majid Jafar, CEO of Sharjah based Crescent Petroleum, has stated that oil could rise to $80 a barrel this year.
In an interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Jafar said that “unprecedented coordination, not just from within OPEC, but with non-OPEC” has tightened supply to the point where prices could rise by an additional $10 in the coming months.
At the same meeting last year, Jafar predicted that oil prices would hover around $60 a barrel.
Jafar also pinpointed the impact of geopolitical issues, stating “…the concern is, a shock like Venezuela, one country, with a major outage of production, could see a shock to prices, and, over the next few years, because of the huge under-investment we had over the last few years, the concern is, as global growth continues, and the balance happens in the market, you could see a shock upwards on oil prices.”
Prices rises have been very beneficial to Arabian Gulf producers, where budget deficits jumped to record levels in some countries after the oil price collapsed from $110 in June 2014 to around $30 in early 2016.
Founded in 1971, Crescent Petroleum is one of the largest private oil and gas companies in the Middle East, with operations in the UAE and Iraq.
