Russian Oil Production Hits Post-Soviet Record
While there has been no love-loss between the U.S. and Russia in recent years, news coming out of Moscow yesterday was sure to cheer the most ardent Russian naysayers in both Washington and especially the U.S. energy patch.
A Russian government official, according to a Bloomberg report, asking to not be named since the information hasn’t been made public yet, said on Thursday that the country’s oil production increased to a new post-Soviet high and is fluctuating between 1.54 million and 1.55 million tons a day, driven mostly by state-run energy firm Rosneft.
Those numbers equal between 11.29 million and 11.36 million barrels per day (bpd) of output, bypassing a previous record set in October 2016, just a few months before Russian agreed to participate with a Saudi-led OPEC to reign in an over supplied global oil market and prop prices back up from multi-year lows.
News about Russia’s increased oil output comes a few days before the next meeting between OPEC and non-OPEC producers in Algiers where the informal group of producers will discuss their next step amid the variety of challenges facing current global oil markets as well as make a decision whether or not to extend their cooperation into next year – a safe bet would be that the game is still afoot and that cooperation will be extended
Top of the agenda at Algiers is sure to include talk about fresh U.S. sanctions that will hit Iran’s energy sector on November 4, and continued problems with Venezuela’s output and uncertainty going forward over Nigerian and Iraqi production. The meeting also comes amid worries that increased trade war moves by Washington against China and counter tariff moves by Beijing will eventually hurt economic growth and dampen global demand for crude oil.
Trump’s global oil markets playbook
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