Subroto

President Suharto of Indonesia appointed a new energy secretary on Monday, replacing former OPEC president and longtime oil-price moderate Subroto in a sweeping cabinet shake-up. The new minister of mines and energy is Ginandjar Kartasasmita, a Japanese-educated martial arts enthusiast. Ginandjar, 46, was chairman of the Investment Coordinating Board in the old cabinet and is seen by foreign businessmen as a tough negotiator and strong nationalist.

Oil prices resumed their slide Monday, and OPEC announced it was dispatching the cartel's new secretary general to talk with leaders of the United Arab Emirates about turning down their oil spigot. Crude prices tumbled 68 cents a barrel to the lowest close since late 1986, hurt by a selloff that traders blamed on too much supply and renewed skepticism about OPEC's ability to restrain production. The decline to $14.

Oil prices resumed their slide Monday, and OPEC announced it was dispatching the cartel's new secretary general to talk with leaders of the United Arab Emirates about turning down their oil spigot. Crude prices tumbled 68 cents a barrel to the lowest close since late 1986, hurt by a selloff that traders blamed on too much supply and renewed skepticism about OPEC's ability to restrain production. The decline to $14.

President Suharto of Indonesia appointed a new energy secretary on Monday, replacing former OPEC president and longtime oil-price moderate Subroto in a sweeping cabinet shake-up. The new minister of mines and energy is Ginandjar Kartasasmita, a Japanese-educated martial arts enthusiast. Ginandjar, 46, was chairman of the Investment Coordinating Board in the old cabinet and is seen by foreign businessmen as a tough negotiator and strong nationalist.

OPEC Secretary General Subroto said today that oil prices have hit bottom and he ruled out emergency OPEC talks to prevent any further declines. Subroto said the OPEC reference basket of seven crudes averaged $14.24 a barrel in the first week of June. The target price of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for this basket is $18. "We feel $14.24 is more or less the bottom already," he told an oil conference in Singapore by telephone from OPEC headquarters in Vienna.

OPEC's Subroto Sees Coal Use Overtaking Oil: Crude oil's share of the global energy mix is declining steadily, and coal will probably overtake it as the world's top energy source by 2020, the secretary general of the cartel told an energy conference in Dallas. "This is a bitter pill for us in OPEC to swallow, as a grouping of 12 Third World oil-producing nations, most of which have single-product economies . . . ," he said Thursday.

OPEC Secretary General Subroto said Monday that he will ask Iran to allow its war foe Iraq to have an oil output quota equal to its own in a bid to restore order to the cartel. Subroto said he will fly to Iran in the final week of August, after a scheduled cease-fire in the eight-year war is due to take effect, to ask for Iran's support in allowing a higher quota. Iran has refused to let Iraq have a quota equal to its own of 2.37 million barrels daily.

OPEC's price monitoring committee ended a two-day emergency session Monday by calling for prompt action to reverse the sharp decline in world oil prices but stopped short of calling for a special meeting of the full 13-member cartel. In a communique released at the conclusion of the meeting, the oil ministers also said it was essential that a joint meeting of the price committee and its long-term strategy committee be held to review existing OPEC strategies and objectives.

OPEC members are complying with a production accord designed to lift crude oil prices, a top official said Monday. "OPEC has more or less found its form right now," said Subroto, secretary-general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Subroto said crude oil prices would definitely reach the cartel's target of $18 a barrel in the second half of this year.

OPEC Did Not Break Ceiling, Official Says: OPEC stayed close to its March output ceiling, the cartel's secretary general said, rebutting independent reports that overproduction totaled about 700,000 barrels daily. Reports that some countries, particularly Iran, were overproducing, raised the possibility that other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries might also ignore the agreement to curtail supply.

A top official of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries urged oil-consuming countries today to release at least 1.8 million barrels per day from their stockpiles. OPEC Secretary General Subroto of Indonesia warned that the world faces an oil shortage of up to 1.8 million barrels per day in the last quarter of 1990. He said world energy consumption has reached 54.5 million barrels per day, while the total production from OPEC and the non-OPEC countries stands at 52.7 million barrels.