International Energy Agency Working Group Meetings - March 2023

On the 15th - 16th on March 2023, two representatives of the Emergency Oil Stocks Agency participated in the meetings of the working groups of the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris - the IEA Standing Group on Emergency Questions (SEQ) and the IEA Standing Group on Oil Markets (SOM).

The SEQ Group deals primarily with the issues of preparedness of member countries for emergencies in the supply of crude oil, petroleum products, natural gas and electricity. At the meeting, the IEA Secretariat presented the results of the working group on the reassessment of the storage obligation of the IEA member countries and a proposal for a solution for the IEA Governing Board, as well as information on the current state of the emergency stocks of crude oil and petroleum products of the IEA member countries, as well as the results of the emergency response reviews of Finland, Lithuania and the Netherlands.

The subject of the SOM meeting was mainly the current situation on the world oil market and the natural gas market. One year after the start of the war in Ukraine, global oil prices are returning to pre-Russian invasion levels, while export of Russian Urals crude oil is trading at deep discounts to find new buyers instead of European ones. Despite the embargoes, the volume of Russian crude oil exports did not decrease notably, but due to the lower price, revenues from this crude oil export decreased significantly. Globally, demand for crude oil is expected to increase due to a recovery in demand in China, which will be responsible for about half of the increase in global crude oil consumption.