What's good for OPEC is no longer good for one of its smallest members and its only representative from East Asia.
While most oil ministers, from Saudi Arabia to Venezuela to Libya, say high prices are here to stay, one oil minister may be trying to talk prices down.
Purnomo Yusgiantoro, the minister of energy and mineral resources for Indonesia, said that a rough consensus had formed among OPEC oil ministers that oil prices are too high.
"It has got to be lower than what we see today, because even OPEC doesn't like to see the high oil price," Purnomo said in an interview on Friday.
That consensus may not be as widely shared as Purnomo says. There are growing indications that OPEC's larger producers are actually getting more comfortable with higher oil prices.
That puts Indonesia in a unique -- and increasingly odd -- position that reflects how its standing within OPEC has changed as Indonesian oil production declines and domestic consumption grows.
For the last two years, Indonesia has not been able to meet its share of production assigned by OPEC, which stands at 1.4 million barrels a day. The country produced an average of 1.1 million barrels a day last year, well below its OPEC limit, and down from 1991's average of 1.6 million barrels a day, according to figures compiled by the US Energy Information Administration.
And while the world's producers struggled last year to meet runaway demand, Indonesia suffered the final indignity for a member of the oil-exporters' club: During the last four months of last year, the country had to import some oil. Now, the government is considering leaving OPEC.
Paradoxically for an oil producer, the high international prices are hurting Indonesia's public finances because the government subsidizes its domestic fuel sales, fixing a lower price at home than on the international market. With rising costs, Purnomo said that the Cabinet planned to announce a 29 percent increase in retail prices for gasoline and diesel fuel tomorrow night. The measure, he acknowledged, will be unpopular and is likely to prompt protests.
But these concerns are far from the minds of Purnomo's counterparts within OPEC, who are getting bolder in their public comments about where they think prices are headed. On Thursday, Ali al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia's oil minister, said he thought prices would remain at US$40 to US$50 a barrel this year. His remarks echoed a similar message from the last meeting of OPEC ministers, in January, when many said US$50 a barrel was not hurting the world economy.
Acknowledging such sentiments, Purnomo cautioned that OPEC ministers would not necessarily agree to increase production at their next meeting, on March 16 in Isfahan, Iran. International oil demand tends to drop each spring, he said, and OPEC oil ministers will be wary of adjusting supply before seeing how big this year's drop may be.
Purnomo said he personally would like to see a drop in Indonesian crude oil prices by late spring to US$35 a barrel, the price assumed in the national budget for calculating the cost of domestic gasoline and diesel subsidies. Indonesian crude trades at a slight discount to the much-more-heavily-traded West Texas Intermediate and Brent crudes. In New York, crude oil futures for April delivery rose US$0.10 to US$51.49 a barrel. Prices have risen 44 percent in the last year.
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