Perhaps it’s the 4.064 million barrels a day that the country produced in 2008, according to its submissions to the Joint Organisations Data Initiative.
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West Texas Intermediate, the United States marker, was 1.6 per cent higher at US$46.21 a barrel in NY.
As per an analyst, “the upcoming meeting isn’t going to do very much”.
Brent North Sea crude for November delivery slid 70 cents to Dollars 49.29 compared with the close on Thursday.
If OPEC and non-OPEC producers agree to implement measures to limit supply when they meet next month in Algeria, it should help the markets rebalance.
“I don’t see a fundamental justification for prices above $50” a barrel, said Hamza Khan, head of commodity strategy at ING Bank, who forecasts that prices will hover around $40 this year and next.
Algeria is hosting meetings of the International Energy Forum and OPEC on September 26-28.
The International Energy Forum will take place in September 2016 in Algiers, when the OPEC countries plan to hold an unofficial meeting, supposedly to renew discussions on the oil production freeze.
If they can engineer a price rise by limiting output, it will merely serve to bring back idled production, as well as tempting producers outside any agreement to ramp up their volumes.
This is especially important if their usual suppliers, such as Saudi Arabia and the other Middle Eastern producers as well as Russian Federation, do finally manage to limit production, or even cut back on shipments to Asian customers.
The statement indicates OPEC’s intent to restrain the shale-oil boom in the U.S. As per Wall Street Journal, OPEC is anxious about U.S. producers rushing into production if oil gets past $60 a barrel, to capitalize on high oil price.
Oil prices have dropped from over $100 per barrel highs in June 2014, to around $46 per barrel. Its present rate of production is slightly over 3.8 million barrels per day, not far away from its pre-sanction levels of over 4 million.
The word “theory” is key here, though, as those countries include Libya, Nigeria, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. J.P. Morgan last week lowered the chances of an agreement to cap production to 10%, down from an earlier estimate of 35%.
Alejandro Barbajosa, Argus vice president for Middle East and Asia-Pacific crude, said that the end of the US ban on crude exports has opened up the potential for more oil to flow eastwards from the Gulf to Asian markets.
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There are other headaches for oil bulls, analysts say. But what do they really mean because the oil market is today in many ways actually fairly balanced. This could mean US production, which is down from last year’s highs, is close to bottoming out, analysts say. At one point this year, the oil price was flirting with the $20 per barrel mark.
