Saudi Arabia is struggling to keep up with the cap on future oil supply, and this has led to a drop of nearly 4pc in oil prices despite Opec’s production cuts.
Brent crude fell by over $3 on Monday and reached a new four-month-low of $78.33 a barrel. This was despite the Saudi cartel extending voluntary production cuts to another three months.
The reason for this was that, even though the Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec+ ) announced on Sunday it would extend its three tranches for significantly longer than anticipated, it also laid a schedule for the unwinding of the cuts, which analysts called “surprisingly detailed”.
Daan Struyven is the head of Goldman Sachs’ oil research. He said it would be harder for Opec+ now to maintain low production levels if demand falls below expectations.
Opec+ announced that it would extend voluntary extra cuts of 2.2m barges of oil per day three months longer than originally planned, to the end September. It also said that two other layers, group and voluntary, will be extended for an additional year, until 2025.
It also stated that the voluntary extra cuts of 2.2mb/d “will be phased out gradually on a month-to-month basis until September 2025 in order to support the market stability”, and that this “monthly increase can be paused, or reversed depending on market conditions”.
Mr Struyven stated: “The communication a surprising detailed default plan for unwinding extra cuts makes is harder to maintain low output if the market proves to be softer than Opec’s bullish expectations.”
Opec estimates that demand will increase by 2.2mb/d in this year. This is much higher than the 1.5mb/d predicted by Goldman Sachs.
Mr Struyven said: “The communication of the gradual unwinding from 2024Q4 reflects an intense desire to bring production back of several members due to high spare capacity.”
Callum Macpherson of Investec’s commodities department said Opec+ has less power to influence market prices.
Eight of Opec+’s 18 members agreed to the additional voluntary supply cuts of 2.2mb/d. These countries (Saudi Arabian, Russia, Iraqi, United Arab Emirates Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Oman), together, make up only 30pc.
Mr Macpherson stated: “It’s becoming harder and harder for Opec+, to convince the markets that they are able to maintain price stability with the limited amount of production it can control.”
After an outage in Norway’s gas processing plant, Europe’s biggest supplier, gas prices in Europe jumped 13pc, the highest this year, just as oil prices dropped.
The European benchmark TTF reached EUR38 per Megawatt Hour before dropping to €36.80.
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