(Bloomberg) — Major OPEC nations have an agreement in principle to keep oil production quotas unchanged next month, as conflict in the Middle East continues to shutter swaths of the group’s output.
A sub-group of seven countries led by Saudi Arabia and Russia is set to keep targets steady in November, in line with an existing road map, delegates said ahead of a video conference on Sunday at which the agreement would be finalized.
The plans come as oil futures creep back up to the $100-a-barrel mark and diesel hits records at the pump amid ongoing conflict in the Middle East, spurring Group of Seven nations to release emergency stocks.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies had already signaled that they would pause production quota hikes through the end of this year, after agreeing a series of modest increases in the six months through August.
Those increases, largely symbolic because of the impact the Iran war has had on Persian Gulf output, theoretically unwound cutbacks made in 2023 and may give the group’s Gulf members greater scope to boost output when the conflict abates.
The Iran war has blunted the impact of any decisions the group has made because production in leading OPEC members such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait remains significantly below levels pumped before the conflict.
The alliance’s next decision will be whether to restore another layer of halted output taken offline in 2022, a complicated process likely to be shaped by the outcome of an ongoing audit of members’ production capacity. Policy for next year will be settled at a full ministerial meeting on Nov. 29.
–With assistance from Fiona MacDonald and Nayla Razzouk.
(Updates with more detail throughout.)
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