Saudi Arabia has no intention of unleashing a 1973-style oil embargo on Western consumers and will isolate oil from politics, the Saudi energy minister Khalid al-Falih said.
"There is no intention," Khalid al-Falih told TASS. "This incident will pass. But Saudi Arabia is a very responsible country, for decades we used our oil policy as responsible economic tool and isolated it from politics."
"My role as the energy minister is to implement my government’s constructive and responsible role and stabilizing the world’s energy markets accordingly, contributing to global economic development," the minister added.
Falih said that if oil prices went up, it would slow down the global economy and trigger a recession. But he added that with Iranian sanctions coming into full force next month, there was no guarantee oil prices would not go higher.
The minister said Saudi Arabia would soon raise output to 11 million barrels per day (bpd) from the current 10.7 million. He added that Riyadh had capacity to increase output to 12 million bpd and Gulf OPEC ally, the United Arab Emirates, could add another 0.2 million bpd.
"We have relatively limited spare capacities and we are using a significant part of them," Reuters cited al-Falih as saying.
