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OPEC

Chair: Katie Legan

PO/Vice Chair: Sophie Grabis and Julia Fischer

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Table of Contents

3. Letter from Chair

4. Members of Committee

5. Committee Background

6. Topic A: Stabilizing Global Oil Production

14. Topic B: Protecting the Environment and Renewable

Energy

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Dear Delegates:

Hello! I am Katie Legan, and as your chair for this year’s OPEC committee, I am honored to

welcome you to LYMUN III! I am a sophomore at Lyons Township high school, and I started

participating in Model United Nations at the beginning of my freshman year. Last year, I had the

pleasure to be the vice chair of the Security Council, and this year, I am excited to be your chair

in OPEC! Remember, LYMUN is a training conference, so while I want OPEC to be challenging

and fun for experienced delegates, ultimately it will be a conference to help newer delegates

hone their skills. I hope this committee is a memorable learning experience that you can take

with you to various conferences you attend in the future, just as many that I have attended have

done for me.

It will be essential for all of you to be well researched on your country’s position on the topics.

On the day of the conference, I am looking for delegates to participate in a manner that not only

is engaging but is also meaningful to discussion, write comprehensive and creative resolutions

that effectively solve issues, and work with other members of the committee. I also expect that

the topics will lead to heavy discussion and I stress the importance of participation. The research

that you have done in the weeks before the conference should help you elaborate in the

discussion, and I hope all of the delegates in my committee come up to the podium to speak. We

all started out as beginners in MUN who were nervous and had a difficult time finding things to

say, but I assure you if you try to be involved in the conversations, you will actually have a fun

time and grow as a speaker.

Like I previously mentioned, this conference is a training conference, so if you have any

questions or concerns regarding anything about the conference, feel free to contact me. My email

is leg504769@student.lths.net. Also, please remember that position papers (one for each topic)

are a requirement for winning awards, so please turn them in! If you would like, you could email

them to me, or if not, you must give them to me at the day of the conference. Again, if you have

any questions please don’t hesitate to ask; I will respond as quickly as I can. I can not wait to see

all of you at LYMUN!

Katie Legan

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Members in Committee:

1. Algeria

2. Angola

3. Ecuador

4. Gabon

5. Indonesia

6. Iran

7. Iraq

8. Kuwait

9. Libya

10. Mexico

11. Nigeria

12. Qatar

13. Russia

14. Saudi Arabia

15. United Arab Emirates

16. Venezuela

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A Brief History of Your Committee:

OPEC was first created in September of 1960 by five original founding members: Iran, Iraq,

Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. These

members created the committee with the main

purpose of stabilizing oil prices, producing a

continuous supply of oil, and providing a fair return

for investors. In the 1960s, while the committee was

still at its early stages, its members first set up its

policies and established a secretariat. The committee established the “Declaratory Statement of

Petroleum Policy of Member Countries” which set the standard that each of the member

countries still have national sovereignty and can produce petroleum how the country wishes.

This policy was extremely important to the members of the committee. At this time, OPEC was

mainly focused on keeping marketers from lowering the oil prices and having a larger impact on

oil prices.

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Topic A: Stabilizing Global Oil Production

Previous Actions Performed to Balance the Markets

As OPEC’s main purpose is to balance the markets, member countries have had to come up with

different strategies in the past in order to drive

prices up or down depending on the

circumstance. After an embargo on oil during

the Arab-Israeli wars, most of the western

world was suffering through an oil shortage.

This is when OPEC became a more notable

organization, as OPEC raised prices and also set up a plan to help developing nations. Shortly

afterwards, prices fell again due to the world’s environmental concerns about oil. As this was

happening, OPEC agreed to support an oil production ceiling, which stabled the prices again.

This move kept prices stable throughout the 1990s, despite all the conflicts that occurred within

the committee. The Persian Gulf War, which was fought between two member countries, had

created conflict during the time, but production quotas and OPEC action kept the committee and

prices together. As prices recovered again, the Cold War came to an end. Because of this, the

market unified and OPEC members began to work with non-OPEC nations to help balance the

markets. Collaboration between non-OPEC members has now become vital to the markets as

well as the committee as a whole. Most committee members believe that in order for some of

their moves to balance the markets to work, all countries producing oil need to be participating.

This is why non-OPEC and OPEC collaboration could be beneficial. Still, the prices were hiking

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up again, and suddenly, the prices reached a record high level of more than $100 per barrel. This

lead to emergency meetings to try and lower the prices. Just as prices continued to soar, an

economic recession struck the world in 2008. The prices started to drop, and in order to fully

stabilize the markets, a production cut was ordered.

Current Situation

The beginning of this decade started with well balanced markets, even with economic concerns

and social unrest throughout several parts of the world. In June of 2011, an OPEC meeting was

called, however, it proved to be a failure. Members of the committee had tried to reach an

agreement on how much oil should be produced in the coming months. Saudi Arabia was

strongly pushing to increase output, due to a low supply, yet some countries thought this was

going to collapse the prices. There was no

agreement, so Saudi Arabia announced that the

country will still increase their production with

other Persian Gulf members. After the meeting,

prices rose to above $101 a barrel. At the end of

that year, production quotas were abandoned

and each country began to make decisions

mainly on their own. Prices began to stabilize again after the 2011 meeting, and stayed that way

until 2014. 2014 marked a high in U.S. shale oil production, which soon led to an oversupply of

oil and a decrease in prices. This time, a production cut was rejected by OPEC members, and the

new idea was to compete against the US for market share. Still, OPEC continued to collaborate

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with non-OPEC producers. Even two years later, there is an oversupply of oil. In February of

2016, four countries started to take action. Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and non-OPEC

member Russia agreed to freeze their oil production to January levels, meaning not producing

any more or any less oil than they did in January, in hopes of raising the price of oil. With the

production freeze plan, Saudi Arabia said that it would not work unless other member countries

joined in. Throughout OPEC meetings, Saudi Arabia started to strongly advocate the plan for a

production freeze. In the April 2016 meeting in Doha,

OPEC members and Russia tried to agree on the

production freeze deal that Saudi Arabia had

previously proposed. OPEC members were almost

one hundred percent sure that they would reach the

agreement, however, Iran did not show up to the meeting. Iran is a very influential and important

member of the committee, and because their representatives did not show up, no deal was made.

The main problem about the deal is that not all member countries support it. For example, as

punishment for Iran’s nuclear deal, sanctions were placed on Iran by western countries and the

UN. This made Iran unable to produce oil and other petroleum products for a long period of

time. During this time, Iran had decreased production in oil because of these sanctions. Recently,

Iran’s sanctions from their nuclear deal had been released. Now, Iran wants to start producing at

high levels until they reach pre-nuclear deal production levels. Iran is fighting for market share

and does not want to suddenly cap their production, which makes them against the production

freeze deal. On top of this, Saudi Arabia said that they might not freeze their production if Iran

does not join in. When the meeting ended, members said that the committee should have another

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meeting to discuss the production freeze and also make sure there is time in between so countries

could think everything over. In June of 2016, OPEC did just that by holding a meeting in Vienna.

Predictably, however, the meeting ended with no production cap policy. Tensions between Saudi

Arabia and Iran again prevented the committee from reaching this deal, and the only compromise

the member countries were able to make

was to appoint a new secretary general for

the committee. Even without such deal on

production, Saudi Arabia is still promising

to try to balance the markets by keeping

their production at a stable level. However,

talks continued as the committee believed

that something needed to be done collectively in order to make sure this issue was solved. OPEC

members began to realize that the crisis is not going away without implementing a plan. On

September 28th, OPEC members agreed to "modestly cut" their oil outputs to help solve the

issue of the high supply and low price of oil. They agreed that they would cut their production

from 33 million barrels a day to 700,000 barrels per day, which is about a 1-2% decrease. While

this plan looked promising at first glance because prices rose by five percent, there are some

setbacks. To begin, the details of how this plan would be done was not specified. OPEC assured

the public that a proposal as to how this will be done would be created at their next formal

meeting on November 30. On top of this, countries like Iran and Iraq wanted to continue

pumping oil at high levels and believe that they should be exempt from such plan. On October

29, more informal meetings were held to try to finalize the plans. These talks were centered

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around the issues of the deal. Iran continued to push the idea that they wanted to pump more oil

until they reached pre-sanction levels, and Iraq continued to express that they needed to produce

more revenue for the war against the Islamic State. The two pushed for exemptions to the new

deal. Saudi Arabia was strongly against their

exemption as the country believes that Iran and

Iraq should take some part in helping the

committee's efforts. The country also stressed how

if there was an exemption, other countries would

have to cut more production than they would like

to. Within the deal, three countries, Iran, Libya (because they are fighting a civil war), and

Nigeria (because some of their facilities have been damaged by terrorists) are exempt. Because

of all these issues, as expected, the committee had gotten nothing done in terms of figuring out

the specifics of the deal. On the same weekend, there was another meeting between OPEC and

non-OPEC members to try to convince them to join in on the deal. This meeting occurred

because OPEC members believed that the deal would not be effective without their inclusion.

Due to the tensions from the other OPEC meeting, the non-OPEC members did not commit to

the deal. The plan was still tentative and had to further discussed in the November 30th meeting.

In an attempt to address some of the issues of the proposal, OPEC met again on October 31st and

passed a long-term strategy. This strategy was something Saudi Arabia had been pushing for

since 2014. The long-term strategy returns OPEC to its main purpose of managing the market

and creates a policy saying that OPEC will be more proactive in terms of balancing the market.

This was put in place because in the past, OPEC failed to intervene when the prices fell. While

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this policy is helpful for the long term, it is more of just a thought of how to go about solving

issues, rather than an actual plan. The long-term strategy plan will ensure that intervention

occurs, but it does not outline how to do so. After continuous speculations about an

implementation of a production cut, there was finally a formal OPEC meeting on November

30th, which ended in an agreement to cut production. The deal reverses the policy OPEC has had

since 2014 where members could produce as they pleased. One of the biggest promises of this

deal as well is that non-OPEC countries also joined in, including Russia, which will help the

markets significantly with such collaboration. Even with the promises that these deals propose,

there are still two main issues that have not been addressed. How is OPEC going to enforce this?

With countries like Iran continually saying

that they want to produce at high levels, how

do we ensure that countries actually abide by

the levels they are supposed to cut their

production down to? The deal did create a

compromise between Iran and Saudi Arabia,

saying that Iran is a special case and can

produce 3.9 million more barrels per day. The key issue here is that countries like Iraq or Libya

that previously wanted to be exempt aren’t. While they might say that they will cut production,

some of the countries simply can not due to their economic struggles, which could play a role in

the success or failure of this deal and how the markets shape up. As a committee, it is important

that we figure out how we will ensure every country follows their quotas, and what we will do if

a country produces more to the point that it could be detrimental to the markets. At the same

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time, this plan still really is just short term. Remember that production cuts may have a

substantial impact on the markets now, but everything could take a turn. This plan looks

promising as prices surged, and it is definitely a step in the right direction, but the past shows

that deals that alter OPEC’s production have never kept the markets stable for a long period of

time. The growth in U.S. shale also seems to pose a problem for the future balancing of the

markets as well because it continues to provide excess supply to the markets. It will be important

that OPEC follows the new long-term strategy idea, but a real plan needs to be set. OPEC for

years has been creating deals and having to change policies to fix the markets. Now action needs

to be taken to figure out how to avoid future imbalances in the market. The plan that we make

together as a committee should focus on how we could ensure that the production policies OPEC

follows will keep the markets stable into the future and how we will enforce the plans to make

sure everyone is on board.

Questions To Consider:

1. Was your country in favor of the production cut? Do they want it to be enforced?

2. How can OPEC ensure that countries follow their quotas? How can the production cut be

enforced?

3. How can OPEC ensure that the production cut works?

4. How can OPEC keep the markets balanced far into the future? What specific policies or

plans can be set in place?

Additional resources:

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<https://www.britannica.com/topic/OPEC>. <http://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/06/03/a-brief-

history-of-opec-at-a-glance/>. <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-06-08/opec-

members-are-unable-to-reach-consensus-on-output-quotas-el-badri-says>.

<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-01/saudi-arabia-will-only-freeze-oil-

production-if-iran-joins-plan>. <http://www.reuters.com/article/us-opec-meeting-

idUSKCN0YN3UV>. <http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/04/opec-oil-producers-weigh-

temporary-output-cap-160417061135501.html>.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/business/energy-environment/major-oil-exporters-fail-to-

agree-on-production-

freeze.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FOrganization+of+the+Petroleum+Exporting+Cou

ntries&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&versio

n=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=collection&_r=0>.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/business/energy-environment/opec-agreement-oil-

prices.html>. <http://www.wsj.com/articles/opec-secretary-general-warns-against-delaying-

production-cuts-1477748202>.

<http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/28/investing/oil-surges-after-opec-informal-meeting/>.

<http://finance.yahoo.com/news/opec-officials-approve-groups-delayed-153602628.html>.

http://www.businessinsider.com/oil-price-november-30-analysis-and-opec-deal-2016-11

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Topic B: Protecting the Environment and Renewable Energy

Background Info and History

In 1992, everything took a spin for OPEC because the United Nations held a Earth Summit with

focus on climate change. Because of the fear of climate change, analysts expected that oil

demand was going to decrease. In response,

OPEC member countries thought it was in their

best interest to make sure countries exercise

caution with oil supply. Environmental concerns

have always been something that OPEC has kept

an eye on, especially because the fossil fuels can

harm the environment. Under statements given

by several members of OPEC, it seems like

protecting the environment and sustainable development is one of the committee's priorities. In

2002, OPEC attended the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. OPEC

has said since that the committee supports the idea of poverty eradication and sustainable

development, and even more notably, one of the three specific approaches that leads to poverty

eradication, protecting the environment. While the environment is important to OPEC, a speech

given by the head of the energy studies department of the OPEC secretariat in 2006 depicted

another issue about focusing on using cleaner and renewable energy. He mentioned that there are

challenges with shifting towards protecting the environment and using a cleaner energy source

because renewables will not meet the growing demand for energy. He also noted the world’s and

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OPEC’s reliance on fossil fuels. In his opinion, it is important to recognize all the “challenges

and opportunities” that come with renewable energy. His speech reflects OPEC’s position at the

time pretty clearly. OPEC was conflicted because the committee wanted to stick to its policy and

strongly supported helping the environment, yet there were other things that the committee had

to think about, like still being able to meet oil demands and keeping prices stable, while not

harming the environment. OPEC is looking for solutions to these challenges. In the UN

Commission on Sustainable Development in 2006, OPEC again put emphasis on the fact that

fossil fuels will probably continue to power most of the world’s energy, but OPEC says that

renewable energy is still welcome. OPEC mentioned all the actions the committee has taken

towards trying to protect the environment, like joining the IEA Greenhouse Gas Research and

Development Programme and the Global Gas Flaring Reduction partnership. Even though OPEC

has taken such actions to help protect the environment, there is still more that could be done.

Current Situation

The situation is still relatively similar to what it was in the past. In 2013, the OPEC Secretary

General spoke on behalf of the committee in the United Nations Climate Change conference. His

speech outlined previous actions, as well as more

recent actions, that OPEC had taken in order to

protect the environment. The secretary general

discussed how the committee supports the United

Nations Framework Convention on Climate

Change.This document was created in 1992, with

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the main purpose of the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a

level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Ever

since then, every member of OPEC has become a signatory on the legislation, and it proves to be

important for the committee. Also within the United Nations Climate Change speech, he

discussed how another plan for environmental protection should be implemented on top of what

is being done, before 2020. Already, the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for

Enhanced Action (ADP) has created the 2015 plan, which says that under the United Nations

Framework Convention on Climate Change, a

plan for a greenhouse gas reduction protocol

must be created by 2015. The secretary general

of OPEC had mentioned that this ADP plan,

along with the Framework Convention should be

implemented together to help climate change. In

addition, he said that OPEC member countries are now even participating in their own ways to

help the environment in ways such as investing in solar power stations and reducing gas flaring.

In fact, each country in OPEC has their own renewable energy plans of their own. While this

sounds like OPEC countries are motivated to help the environment, some countries have other

motives behind such plans. Certain countries in OPEC, especially some of the greatest powers in

OPEC who produce a lot of fossil fuels, are creating renewable energy plans for economic

reasons. Since most countries in OPEC are reliant on oil and oil is the basis of their economies,

these countries cannot afford to discontinue fossil fuel usage for renewable energy. These

countries see renewable energy as more of a gateway to power in the oil industry. This may

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concept may seem confusing at first, since it seems like renewable energy would hurt their

chances as becoming a power in oil due to the fact that an alternative source of energy will most

likely make the country less reliant on fossil fuels. However, if you think about it, a lot of OPEC

countries also use oil. The oil that they are using could have been oil they have exported and

made more money off of, but instead, it was used within their country. Within OPEC countries,

the demand for energy and oil is rising, and the countries will need to provide more for

themselves. Soon enough, if the trend continues, the oil available for export could grow slim, and

these countries would need to import oil

rather than export. OPEC countries fear this

crisis and are thinking of other ways to

provide energy so there is oil to export. This

is why renewable energy is key to becoming a

global oil power. If OPEC members do not

need to use oil to provide their citizens energy, there is more oil to export. These countries want

to promote renewable energy so that more of their people decide to use it over the oil the country

wants to export. This would allow countries to prosper and reach their goals of being a global oil

power. Some countries do genuinely want to protect the environment and are not focusing on this

economic benefit. Even though member countries have set their own environmental and

renewable energy plans, which are quite different, and ratified other UN environmental policies,

OPEC has yet to create their own universal renewable energy plan. If a plan is not made, it could

be detrimental to the committee, since they are the world’s top oil producers and the committee

could lose money for not showing that they are working on their own to protect the environment.

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Questions To Consider:

1. What things should OPEC do to help protect the environment? What should be included in an

environmental plan? How can OPEC protect the environment and use alternative energy sources

while still meeting energy demands?

2. Should OPEC create a renewable energy plan? If so, how much renewable energy should be

used? What energy sources should be implemented?

3. What is your country’s motives behind using renewable energy? Would it benefit the country

economically to use renewable energy?

4. Does your country have renewable energy/environmental plans? What is your country already

doing to protect the environment?

Additional Resources:

<http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/24.htm>.

<http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/967.htm>. <http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/1088.htm>.

<http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/press_room/2673.htm>.

<http://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/background_publications_htmlpdf/application/pdf/c

onveng.pdf>. <http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/press_room/315.htm>.

<http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/press_room/2673.htm>.

<http://unfccc.int/key_steps/durban_outcomes/items/6825.php>.

<http://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/press_room/2673.htm>.

<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/07/saudis-solar-energy/395315/>.

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