Saudi Arabia calls on non-OPEC states to decrease oil production

During that week, crude inventories USOILC=ECI fell 1.3 million barrels, compared with expectations for an increase of 671,000 barrels.

Cutting output is not the only option available to OPEC, Al-Falih said in Dhahran, eastern Saudi Arabia, according to local newspaper Asharq al-Awsat.

When asked about U.S. shale oil’s share in this equation, Marc Ostwald said that if oil prices reach 55 dollars and above then there will be more shale oil coming to the market. – Commerzbank’s head of commodity research Eugen Weinberg and team.

Algeria’s Boutarfa presented Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh with a proposal for a collective cut of 1.1 million barrels a day in Tehran on Saturday.

Hedge funds and money managers have boosted their bullish wagers on US crude oil, data showed on Monday, as the market turned more optimistic that the world’s top oil producers would come together to hammer out the details of a deal to cut output. OPEC’s largest producer had pulled out of a meeting on Friday with the non-member producers including Russian Federation, saying there was no point as OPEC itself could agree internally. Libya and Nigeria want to be exempted. “Right now the debate revolves around how to divide” the production cuts, he said.

Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister Khalid al-Falih stated that inventory curbs may not be necessary, justifying this by saying oil prices will stabilize in year 2017 even without an interpolation from the OPEC. It doesn’t help that Iran and Saudi Arabia are longtime enemies that have been fighting proxy wars in Yemen and Syria.

OPEC is also proposing a 600,000 barrel a day output cut by non-OPEC producers. The country has so far resisted OPEC’s request that it join the cut, offering instead to freeze production at its current level.

There’s also concern over the ability of OPEC, notorious for cheating on its own quotas, to enforce any output ceiling given security concerns in many member countries.

“Algeria’s minister of energy arrives in Moscow on Monday evening”, the embassy spokesman said.

If OPEC does manage to get a deal and oil prices rise – though the increase may be modest – then this will hit the wallets of billions of consumers worldwide.

Oil prices have fallen by more than half since 2014, which has been a boon to drivers at the gas station, but put tremendous pressure on oil and gas companies as well as countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia that rely on oil exports.

Since oil is traded in U.S. dollars, a strong greenback weighs on oil prices since it reduces costs and increases revenues for producers, especially those who operate domestically with other currencies, while it makes fuel purchases more expensive for importers that use their own currencies domestically, potentially hitting on demand.