OPEC+ looks set to stay the course at Monday’s Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee meeting, with four anonymous delegates telling Reuters the group is unlikely to tinker with its output policy. A fifth source said it was too early to say. The plan on the table remains: raise production by 548,000 barrels per day in August—part of a previously announced unwinding of 2.2 million bpd in voluntary cuts by eight members. They are then expected to agree to a further 548,000 bpd in September.
Lower demand for crude oil from refiners at home gave a boost to U.S. exports of the commodity, turning it into a net exporter to OPEC member Nigeria in two of the seven months since the start of this year.
The OPEC+ producers pumped 41.559 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil in June, up by 349,000 bpd from May, but lower than the 411,000 bpd monthly increase under the alliance’s output hike plan.
Saudi Arabia raised crude output far above its OPEC+ quota last month, joining other producers in a rush to export oil out of the Persian Gulf as Israel went to war with Iran, according to the International Energy Agency.
“There is no peak oil demand on the horizon,” OPEC Secretary General Haitham Al Ghais wrote in the foreword of OPEC’s latest World Oil Outlook (WOO), which sees global oil demand growing by about 19% from now until 2050 to reach 123 million barrels per day (bpd).
Senior officials from three of OPEC’s core producer nations — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait — lined up to say that the super-sized addition of supply by the producer club at the weekend was needed by the global market.
The OPEC+ oil producer alliance is likely to make its next hike in collective output its last for a while, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
With the producer club nearing the end of a first phase of jumbo output hikes, the market’s attention is turning to what will come after. The organization and its allies have been voluntarily holding back a second, smaller tranche of supply, propping up oil prices. Focus is now on the group’s intentions for those barrels.
This is not the first ban for three of the five media outlets. Back in 2023, OPEC refused to accredit journalists from Reuters, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal for a ministerial meeting of OPEC+. The Financial Times suggested at the time it was because those publications sought to break a story before meetings were fully concluded, which could affect oil prices and Saudi Arabia’s top oil man Abdulaziz bin Salman wanted to avoid such volatility as the kingdom tried to push prices higher.
Oil prices eked out gains this week, a sign that the market has largely shrugged off the larger-than-expected output hike announced on Saturday by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies. Despite the current tightness, forecasters are pointing out that supply growth is at risk of outpacing demand later in the year.
Tanker tracking by Bloomberg shows that the Gulf state’s crude exports surged to a 19-month high in June as the OPEC+ alliance brought curbed barrels back. Most of Kuwait’s oil flows to Asian countries, including China, Japan and South Korea. Sheikh Nawaf said recent demand has been driven by Asia in particular, noting that KPC’s global business partners have been asking the company if it has additional barrels.