Abstract
Motivation and objective of the study
What if OPEC decided to abandon organizing residual production collectively, transitioning the world permanently to a competitive oil market? This commentary is based on a forthcoming KAPSARC paper, “Cooperate or Compete? Insights from Simulating a Global Oil Market with No Residual Supplier” (Rioux et al. 2020). It constructs scenarios in which OPEC members, or OPEC members other than Saudi Arabia, start behaving as competitive price takers in 2020 and stop participating as part of a collective residual oil supplier. This analysis employs a standard economic equilibrium model to simulate the transition to a purely competitive world oil market from 2020 to 2030.