OPEC Is Ready To Embrace $100 Oil

OPEC has signaled it may actually be fine with oil at $100 after several cartel delegates said there were no plans to accelerate production growth despite soaring prices.

Brent crude briefly topped $99 today after Russia’s President Vladimir Putin signed a decree recognizing the independence of the two eastern Ukrainian regions of Lugansk and Donetsk and ordered army forces to enter them for peacekeeping purposes, the Kremlin said.

According to a Bloomberg report published later in the day, OPEC delegates from Iraq and Nigeria said they saw no need to change the terms of the current OPEC+ agreement, which calls for the addition of a combined 400,000 bpd to total monthly production until pre-pandemic levels of output are reached.

However, OPEC has been consistently failing to reach its quota, led by countries including Iraq and Nigeria. According to experts, the reasons for this failure are continued underinvestment, which has affected spare capacity.

“The market will have more and more oil,” Iraqi oil minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar Ismail told Bloomberg. “We will not create any growth to the commercial storage. We will secure all the demand by making the required supply.”

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Source: OilPrice