Qatar's ruler said natural gas prices are too low and wants them to be linked to the price of crude oil. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani told a meeting of gas exporting nations in the Qatari capital that oil's rebound this year, after it collapsed last year from nearly $150 per barrel, has not been mirrored in the price of gas. “The increase experienced by the oil price this year has not been followed by an improvement in gas prices, and we hope that this will only be temporary,” the emir told the 11-member state Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF). “It is necessary to work to restore the correlation between the price of oil and gas, and the decisions taken by this board must be equal to our ambitions,” he added. The emir, whose country sits atop the world's largest natural gas reserves, wants the group - dubbed by some the Gas OPEC - to devise a mechanism linking gas and oil prices. Gas prices collapsed late last year in line with oil, which plunged from a high of around $147 per barrel to $37 before stabilizing at around $75 this year. In Moscow, it was reported that GECF has chosen a candidate from Russia, by far the world's biggest gas exporter, as its secretary general, the Russian energy ministry said on Wednesday. The group, which controls nearly 70 percent of the world's reserves, picked Leonid Bokhanovsky, vice president of Russian energy engineering and construction company Stroytransgaz, at a meeting in Doha. “Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko held a series of bilateral consultations and meetings during the ministerial meeting of the GECF in Doha,” the Russian energy ministry said in a statement. “As a result, the Russian candidate was unanimously elected to the post of secretary-general.” Russia exports over four times more gas each year than the next biggest country in the group, Algeria. Other GECF members are Bolivia, Equatorial Guinea, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela.
