U.S. And OPEC Flood Oil Market Ahead Of Midterms
OPEC and the U.S. are together adding enormous volumes of new supply, which together have softened the oil market.
In October, OPEC hiked oil production to the highest level since 2016, back before the oil production cuts went into effect, according to a recent Reuters survey. The higher output, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, come just as Iranian oil is going offline. Also, Libya saw a sharp rebound in production, although the country is not part of the OPEC+ production cuts.
The 15 countries in OPEC produced an average 33.31 million barrels per day in October, the highest since December 2016. That was also up 390,000 bpd from September. “Oil producers appear to be successfully offsetting the supply outages from Iran and Venezuela,” said Carsten Fritsch of Commerzbank.
Russia, which is not part of OPEC but part of the OPEC+ coalition, continues to produce at post-Soviet record highs.
Iran lost 100,000 bpd in October, due to buyers cutting back as U.S. sanctions near, but the losses were more modest than many analysts had expected. In fact, despite the hardline rhetoric from Washington, the U.S. is poised to grant waivers to several countries that are unable to cut their imports of Iranian oil to zero.
That was largely predictable. Top importers of Iranian oil, including India, China and Turkey, could not slash their purchases to zero without incurring a significant economic cost. The U.S. pressed these countries, but ultimately had to back down. “We want to achieve maximum pressure but we don’t want to harm friends and allies either,” U.S. national security adviser John Bolton said on Wednesday. He recognized that some “may not be able to go all the way, all the way to zero immediately.” The admission is notable since Bolton is widely known as one of the most extreme hardliners when it comes to Iran.
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