During the Opec decade, Saudi Arabia was always reluctant to admit playing the role in which outside analysts, some of its fellow member governments, and indeed the forces of market circumstance tended repeatedly to cast it. It almost always denied acting as a swing supplier to support Opec price levels. But it never took really decisive action to reject that role until it experimented with ‘netback pricing’ in 1985–6. That experiment, perhaps as much a matter of exasperation verging on fury as of fully calculated risk, effectively punctured the then inflated pretences of Opec ‘price administration’, as well as collapsing world price levels for crude. Even so, it was mainly a gesture of accommodation to changes in the oil market that were already irresistibly in train.

At a stroke, the Kingdom's oil decision-makers pulled the carpet from under the official price system for the whole of Opec. That had been founded upon the price level agreed at any time for the ‘marker crude’, Arabian Light or some surrogate for it. Prices for all other Opec crudes had been related, in theory at least, to the price of this marker by ‘differentials’ in their refining values and transport costs to key markets. (Arguments about keeping these differentials up to date went on interminably. But lip-service to the principle was there.) In July 1986, Saudi Arabia simply abolished any fixed price level for that marker crude at the time it was loaded.