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On 22 February 2011, at the extraordinary ministerial meeting in Riyadh, the International Energy Forum (IEF) turned a new page with the adoption of the Charter in which further institutionalisation of energy cooperation among producing, consuming and transit countries was agreed. In its relatively short history, the consumer–producer dialogue can already look back on many important achievements. Many of these have come about in the past ten years. Yet without the confidence building of the early years, none of the achievements would have happened. The dialogue has been nurtured by various countries and has survived because no one party has or has been allowed to claim it as its own or become a vehicle for special interests. In the future, new countries will need to come along to extend the dialogue further. Now entering its third decade, the emphasis on the traditional producing and consuming countries is changing to include new consumers and producers, bringing new dimensions and challenges to the dialogue. The existing international organisations such as OPEC and IEA, whose roots can be traced to developments and events in the 1960s and '70s, have not been able to accommodate the increasing importance of the energy interests of these newcomers.

The issues which provided Iraq with the pretext for its invasion of Kuwait were oil pricing policies and oil revenues. Of course, Iraq had broader political and regional objectives, but its most immediate and pressing concern was to loosen the economic and financial noose that was threatening strangulation. Low oil prices, technical limitations on current oil output and financial constraints on the investments required to reclaim or expand productive capacity were causing intractable problems for the government and severe hardship for the population. President Saddam Hussain was finding himself pushed further and further into a corner and tried to get out of it by invading Kuwait. This behaviour was utterly unacceptable and rightly condemned by the international community. But for the purposes of this analysis it is relevant to recall that oil was an integral part of the story.