New Saudi warning to oil consumers

Press, 18 June 1979, Page 6

New Saudi warning to oil consumers

NZPA-Reuter Tokyo _ Consuming countries, particularly the United States, must seriously reduce oil consumption, Saudi Arabia’s Oil and Mineral Resources Minister (Shejkh Ahmed Zaki Yamani) has said in an interview published in Tokyo.

“I am confident that they will not have to face an oil supply shortage in the near future if consumption in their countries is reduced,” he was quoted as telling the Japanese daily, “Sankei Shimbun.” Asked for his comment on a forecast by the International Energy Agency that supplies of crude will be short by 3.3 million barrels a day in 1985, Mr Yamani I said: “I don’t think that oil I supplies would be short that much.” The Saudi Arabian Minister added that daily crude

supplies were up to one million barrels short because the consuming countries were increasing their oil stockpile. Mr Yamani told a visiting “Sankei” correspondent in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that unless the consuming countries voluntarily cut consumption, the price of oil would soar, causing setbacks to their economies. The Oil Minister said that a possible war, in which some socialist countries and the Soviet Union tried to occupy parts of the Arab world, “would become an effective Third World War.” “There is no possibility of such a war involving only oil-producing countries and the Soviet Union ... It would turn out to be a war between the United States and the Soviet Union.”