Opec met Big Oil on Thursday in an impressive gathering of top oil muscle but failed to offer much hope for a quick cure to the scare over rising fuel costs.
The world's oil majors and Opec are under pressure from consumer country governments to invest more cash in new capacity to stop $50-a-barrel crude becoming commonplace.
Chief executives called on producer countries to permit easier investment access to meet the fastest growing energy demand growth in a generation.
"Meeting the requirements of the next 10 years will depend on decisions taken today," said Total chief Thierry Desmarest. "A greater opening of these countries is urgent if we are to avoid growing instability in the oil market."
The heads of ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, BP, ChevronTexaco and ENI also attended the conference run by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Cartel members like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran plus non-Opec Mexico bar, or place heavy restrictions, on investment in upstream sectors that hold the biggest reserves in the world.
Commercial producers, thrown out by Opec in the nationalisations of the 1970, countered oil price shocks then by opening up new provinces like the North Sea.
Now those areas are near maturity and the majors would jump at the chance to get back into the multi-billion-barrel fields that are key to meeting explosive demand growth in China and India.
ExxonMobil chief executive Lee Raymond said world oil demand requirements could as much as double by 2020, rising 65-85 million barrels daily from this year's 82 million barrels a day. "Much of the remaining oil reserves are restricted for international companies," said Claude Mandil, representing consumer nations as director of the International Energy Agency. "In some places they are totally forbidden and in some places there is limited access."
Keen to prevent prices rising high enough to hit fuel demand growth, Opec raised its output quotas on Wednesday and is pumping at a 25-year high.
But cartel ministers do not want to risk an investment free-for-all that could see a return of the sort of glut that saw prices slump to $10 in 1999.
Cautious producers like Iran and Venezuela went as far on Thursday as to suggest production cuts might even be possible when Opec next meets in December, despite prices now at $44 a barrel.
For oil companies, keeping shareholders happy by securing profit margins will outweigh consumer country interest in lower prices.
Oil majors often are agnostic on price levels, focusing on margins. Most continue to benchmark new projects against an upper cost limit of just $16-$20 a barrel.
"The whole art is to run a company like Shell successfully whatever the oil price is," said Royal Dutch/Shell Group chairman Jeroen van der Veer.
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