A week after the Jeddah Energy Meeting, the world's biggest crude producers and consumers will get another chance to tackle the problem of oil price rise at a meeting this week. More than 3,000 delegates, including leading corporate and political figures, are to meet at the 19th World Petroleum Congress (WPC) in Madrid, which runs from Monday to Thursday after an official opening reception Sunday. “It's the Olympics of the oil and gas industry,” director of the WPC, Pierce Riemer, told a press conference last week. The gathering follows a surge in oil prices Friday that took both New York light sweet crude and Brent North Sea crude to record levels beyond $142 a barrel. The president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the head of the International Energy Agency and ministers from Nigeria, Russia, Venezuela, India, France and the Netherlands are expected to be present. They are to be joined by the bosses of major international oil groups ExxonMobil of the United States, CNOOC of China, Britain's BP and Shell, Rosneft of Russia and Total of France. Saudi Arabia convened a hastily arranged meeting of consumers and producers in Jeddah last weekend to tackle the problem of record oil prices.
