Zanganeh made the remarks on the sidelines of the 4th Iranian Petroleum and Energy Club Congress & Exhibition, which kicked off today in Tehran and will continue through Oct. 18.
Noting that the oil market follows intelligence and reasonable planning, the veteran minister said the US president cannot curb the oil prices by bullying others.
Zanganeh pointed to the fluctuations of oil prices, saying the market and the hiking prices are the best evidence of concern that the market is in short supply and is rightly nervous about the severe shortage of oil in the coming months.
“That is why prices stand at $83 per barrel one day, and reach $85 another day,” he added.
Referring to the US’s impending sanctions and the market’s woes on cutting the Iranian oil to zero, Zanganeh said The United States cannot do much more to target Iranian oil exports.
Last week, the minister reacted to the remarks by Saudi authorities regarding oversupplying the oil market, saying “such brags would only satisfy US President Donald Trump, but the market would never buy them.”
Mohammed Bin Salman, heir to the Saudi throne, had said, “we export as much as two barrels for any barrel that disappeared from Iran recently, so we did our job and more.”
Zanganeh further said what the Saudis had been supplying the market with recently were not from Riyadh’s spare capacity but was from tapping its oil stocks.
The Iranian official emphasized that statements made by any country about the supply of oil to offset shortages caused by Iran’s oil sanctions had little or no impact on the market situation, but had mere short-term psychological effects and were ultimately aimed at satisfying the United States and assisting Trump in his imposition of the sanctions against Iran.
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