In April 2018, with oil prices near a three-year high of $75 a barrel, Opec ministers gathering in Jeddah were buoyant. Then US President Donald Trump sent a tweet: “Looks like Opec is at it again. With record amounts of oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, oil prices are artificially very high! No good and will not be accepted!”
That marked the start of an era of unprecedented presidential intervention in oil markets. But things are about to change, with the social-media shy incoming president Joe Biden unlikely to conduct petro-diplomacy by tweet, and more focused on the transition to cleaner fuels.
Mr Trump’s approach was often contradictory and defied convention. But he hit his mark more often than not, say industry experts.
“The president took to Twitter instead of sending the secretary of state to the Middle East or the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, a professor at Tufts University outside Boston, Massachusetts. “And the thing about it is, it was effective.”
What began with Mr Trump proclaiming “American energy dominance” and berating Opec for not producing enough oil, culminated this year when he urged the producer cartel to raise prices to save the US shale patch from disaster.
While Mr Trump’s Twitter feed has talked of oil or Opec dozens of times since he took office — often as prices neared $70 a barrel — Mr Biden may take a leaf from the Obama administration’s book. In eight years, the previous president’s White House mentioned the cartel on social media just twice. For the most part, international oil sailed below the radar in policy too.
With urgent tasks on Mr Biden’s plate — from the coronavirus pandemic and distribution of vaccines to stimulating a battered economy — petro-diplomacy will not be an immediate priority, say analysts.
Gone will be the influence of Harold Hamm, the billionaire head of shale producer Continental Resources and Trump confidant who spoke frequently to the president as oil prices crashed this year, according to a recent note from consultancy Rapidan Energy. In will come environment-focused experts such as Gina McCarthy, a former environmental regulator who will now co-ordinate policy as a domestic “climate tsar”.