Saudi Arabia’s energy minister said it is premature to discuss any changes to the OPEC-led supply cut pact as market rebalancing is unlikely to happen until the second half of 2018 even with the current outage of the North Sea Forties pipeline. Any potential exit from current cuts would be done gradually once the market returns to balance but drawing down inventories will still take more time, Khalid al-Falih told Reuters on Wednesday. “We haven’t seen any major declines in inventories that we didn’t expect. As we said last month, we still have approximately 150 million barrels of overhang, and it is going to take the second half 2018 to draw that down,” Falih said. “We expect the first few months of 2018 to be either flat or a build (in inventories) as it is typically the case with the seasonality with the oil market especially […]