تغییر در تقاضای نفت آمریکا و تاثیر آن بر سهم بازار اوپک

Tremendous political pressure is being exerted on the US government by different political parties to diversify its sources of foreign oil supplies by switching from the reliance on OPEC's oil to that originating from non-OPEC nations. Without a doubt, such a shift would adversely impact the market share of some OPEC members, particularly Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria. These countries should therefore consider seriously the negative impact of this scenario and consequently formulate individual or joint production policies aiming at protecting their oil market share. To help OPEC achieve this objective, there is a need to estimate the demand function of US oil imports. This paper proffers an estimate of such a function, taking into account, among other variables, the impact of US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

The United States consumes about one third of the World total oil production every year. This makes the US a significant customer for OPEC and other major oil producers. The considerable US role as an importer is expected to continue for the next two decades of the new millennium. The US has increased its crude oil imports by 40% during the period 1988–1998. While the US has increased its imports by 25% from the Arab Gulf states during the same period, its oil imports went up by 122% from the countries of the southern region of the Atlantic Ocean such as Venezuela, Nigeria, Angola and Colombia. This indicates that the US has just shifted its oil supplies within OPEC members. Although the US government will continue to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, its imports from non-OPEC countries will increase. Hence, it is of paramount importance for OPEC nations to estimate the US long-run oil demand function. The estimation of such a function would help OPEC countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria in formulating their production policies and making sound decisions regarding their respective productive capacity. The purpose of this short paper is to proffer an estimation of the US long-run oil demand function. The rest of the paper is made up of two sections. Section 2 discusses the econometric procedure, data, empirical results and implications for OPEC, and Section 3 concludes the paper.

This paper uses a set of data for the already defined variables X, Y and Z. The time series of each of these variables was found non-stationary and I(1). But differencing each series delivered a stationary one which is I(0). In addition, the empirical results show that there is a linear trend in the data of X, Y and Z. It was also found that there is only one cointegration equation which represents the long-run US demand relationship for crude oil imports. Finally, a reliable stable demand equation was constructed through OLS using the long-run relationship between X, Y and Z. This demand model explained the growth rate in X in terms of: (i) the past disequilibrium between the levels of X, Y and Z which is the long-run relationship lagged one period; (ii) the variable SR lagged one period; and (iii) the growth in Y and Z. Investigating the US demand for crude oil imports in this paper has proved that OPEC's ability to maintain prices depends on the coherence (or cohesion) of its members to their assigned quotas and cooperation with non-OPEC producers in order to alleviate their competitive behavior. This is much more important than changes of the level of the strategic petroleum reserve possessed by the US. This paper concentrates also on the point that the US will remain a very important customer for OPEC even though there are recently some new emerging considerable customers.