OPEC crude oil production increased by approximately 173.4 thousand bbl/day to reach to 32.327 million bbl/day during the month of June 2018.
Last month’s OPEC crude oil production increase came in line OPEC’s members recent decision during OPEC 174th Meeting to increase oil output through maintaining a 100 percent conformity with OPEC output cut deal levels to offset the decline of oil output from few of OPEC members such as Venezuela, Libya and Iran’s expected oil output decline due to U.S. sanctions that will be imposed on the country later this year.
The cartel output increase also came in line with recent comments made by U.S. president in which he criticized the cartel and urged its members to increase oil output to drive oil prices down.
Looking at OPEC crude oil production data published in OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report this month, we can see that the biggest increase in crude oil production came from Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). KSA’s June crude oil production increased by 405.4 thousand bbl/day during June 2018. Other gulf oil producers such as Iraq, UAE and Kuwait also managed to moderately increase their oil output by 71.5 tb/day, 35.1 tb/day and 27.3 tb/day respectively.
OPEC Crude Oil Production
And despite crude oil output declines from Libya, Iran, Angola and Venezuela, that accumulatively accounted for approximately 412.8 thousand bbl/day of OPEC’s oil output decline for June 2018, Saudi Arabia’s oil output increase for June managed to offset these declines.
An important trend to keep an eye on here is Iran’s oil output decline that started off last month. This trend is expected to accelerate in the next few months in anticipation of U.S. sanctions that will be imposed on Iran in November 2018. As a result of those sanctions, Iran oil output is expected to fall by more than 1 million by end of 2018 to early 2019. However, so far, it seems that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil producers are in control and their oil output increase could offset Iran’s oil output decline.
