{"id":51876,"date":"2020-03-20T19:16:02","date_gmt":"2020-03-21T00:16:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51876"},"modified":"2020-03-20T19:16:07","modified_gmt":"2020-03-21T00:16:07","slug":"the-inevitable-outcome-of-the-oil-price-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=51876","title":{"rendered":"The Inevitable Outcome Of The Oil Price War"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/oilprice.com\/Energy\/Oil-Prices\/The-Inevitable-Outcome-Of-The-Oil-Price-War.html\">The Inevitable Outcome Of The Oil Price War<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/d32r1sh890xpii.cloudfront.net\/article\/718x300\/2020-03-19_r4o859bmj0.jpg\" alt=\"Putin MBS\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>One might reasonably posit that when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) signalled that Saudi Arabia was once again going to produce oil to the maximum to crash oil prices in a full-scale oil price war, Russian President Vladimir Putin probably fell off the horse he was riding bare-chested somewhere in Siberia because he was laughing so much. There is a phrase in Russian intelligence circles for clueless people that are ruthlessly used without their knowledge in covert operations, which is \u2018a useful idiot\u2019, and it is hard to think of anyone more \u2018useful\u2019 in this context to the Russians than whoever came up with Saudi\u2019s latest \u2018plan\u2019. Whichever way the oil price war pans out, Russia wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In purely basic oil economics terms, Russia has a budget breakeven price of US$40 per barrel of Brent this year: Saudi\u2019s is US$84. Russia can produce over 11 million barrels per day (mbpd) of oil without figuratively breaking sweat; Saudi\u2019s average from 1973 to right now is just over 8 mbpd. Russia\u2019s major oil producer, Rosneft, has been begging President Putin to allow it to produce and sell more oil since the OPEC+ arrangement was first agreed in December 2016; Saudi\u2019s major oil producer, Aramco, only suffers value-destruction in such a scenario. This includes for those people who were sufficiently trusting of MbS to buy shares in Aramco\u2019s recent IPO. Russia can cope with oil prices as low as US$25 per barrel from a budget and foreign asset reserves perspective for up to 10 years; Saudi can manage 2 years at most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Inevitable Outcome Of The Oil Price War One might reasonably posit that when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) signalled that Saudi Arabia was once again going to produce oil to the maximum to crash oil prices in a full-scale oil price war, Russian President Vladimir Putin probably fell off the horse he was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[592,23083,600,694,701,26228],"class_list":["post-51876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","category-geopolitics","tag-oil-price","tag-oil-price-com","tag-opec","tag-russia","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-simon-watkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51877,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51876\/revisions\/51877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}