Figure does not include Gabon, which rejoined OPEC on July 1, 2016.
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After the monthly Brent spot price sank even more-as did the WTI-in early 2016, crude rebounded to about $50/bbl.
Earnings in 2015 fell 46 percent from $753 billion in 2014.
Taking the lion’s share of the earnings – roughly one-third of the total revenue – Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s largest producer earned $130 billion in 2015. That’s worse than 2015, when OPEC revenue plummeted by 46% to $404 billion, the lowest level since 2004, the EIA said in a report August 26.
The EIA said the negative impact of low oil prices on revenue decline vary among OPEC members.
Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) earned 4 billion in net oil export revenue in 2015, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates.
What’s more, EIA analysts project that in 2016 that revenue could drop again to $341 billion.
Generally, countries with sizeable financial assets, such as the Persian Gulf States (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates), are affected to a lesser degree than other oil-producing countries, such as Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela, that do not have large financial reserves, according to the report.
Jabar Ali al-Luaibi, on a visit to the southern oil city of Basra, renewed calls for local and global oil companies in Iraq to increase production and announced plans to double crude storage capacity at the country’s southern export terminals to 24 million barrels in the “coming years” from 12 million barrels now. A number of OPEC countries have experienced relatively high levels of unplanned outages. In Venezuela, oil service companies have largely stopped work after state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela stopped paying its bills.
Moreover, armed conflicts in Libya and Nigeria led to unforeseen output cuts. “The resulting lack of available oil export outlets has necessitated that most of the country’s production capacity remain shut in”.
In the six months since the bombing of the subsea Forcados pipeline, the first major attack on oil infrastructure in Nigeria, dozens of attacks have taken place, resulting in outages of more than 700,000 barrels per day, Reuters reported.
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Opec members will meet on the sidelines of the International Energy Forum (IEF), which groups producers and consumers, in Algeria on September 26 to 28.
