It would be the fourth time the Saudi Arabia-led producer group has delayed plans to revive output. That’s eased worries about a supply surplus developing this year. The International Energy Agency is calling for an overhang of 450,000 barrels a day and, in the US, inventories are sitting at a three-month high while one measure of market tightness is flashing signs of oversupply.
OPEC+ has not discussed delaying the increase in its oil supply currently planned to begin in April, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Monday.
Iran called on all members of the OPEC oil cartel last week to take united action against the U.S.’s ramping up of sanctions on the Islamic Republic. The statement from its President Masoud Pezeshkian followed Donald Trump’s instruction to his key cabinet colleagues to increase sanctions on Iran to reduce its oil exports to zero.
Output fell to 8.962 million barrels a day last month, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public. That’s 16,000 barrels a day below Russia’s target under the OPEC+ supply agreement.
Tough US sanctions on Russian oil are allowing the biggest Middle Eastern producers to raise prices for their main market by the most in years, and may help bring in additional petrodollars to meet crucial funding needs.
When President Donald Trump came into office, oil prices jumped. The immediate reason was simple enough: Trump likes a hardline approach to countries he sees as enemies, and that means Iran and sanctions on its oil exports. But there’s another factor at play, too: U.S. shale.
ne of President Trump’s first orders of business following the initial burst of executive orders was to declare he would ask OPEC to ramp up its oil production to bring down prices.
A statement posted on OPEC’s website on December 5 highlighted that OPEC+’s required production level for 2025 and 2026 is 39.725 million barrels per day. That statement pointed out that the required production level for Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Oman “is before applying any additional production adjustments”. It also noted that UAE required production has been increased by 300,000 barrels per day and added that this increase will be phased in gradually starting April 2025 until the end of September 2026.
China has been importing Iranian oil indirectly via proxies. According to StanChart, crude oil imports from Malaysia clocked in at 1.456 million barrels per day (mb/d) in June, the second-highest monthly average on record.
Iraq quickly extinguished the blaze that erupted at a storage tank at the Rumaila oil field on Jan. 24, but said the incident knocked out about 300,000 barrels a day — or 25 percent of the field’s capacity — during the following week. The country’s production averaged just over 4 million barrels a day last month, in line with its OPEC quota.