New York. The price of Texas intermediate oil (WTI) fell 1.8% yesterday and closed at US$109.78, one day before the OPEC+ alliance, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, announces whether it continues with its plan to add 648,000 barrels per day of oil in August. crude oil to its entire oil supply.
At the end of operations on the New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex), WTI futures contracts for delivery in August lost 1.98 dollars compared to the previous close.
Meanwhile, black gold fell below the $110 barrier, thus breaking three consecutive sessions on the rise. In the market, the 23 OPEC+ countries are expected to certify the aforementioned increase in production, as they agreed on June 2 under growing Western pressure to open the taps more in order to curb the rise in energy prices and inflation. .
On the eve of tomorrow’s telematic meeting, the ministers of the thirteen partners of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) closed a videoconference on Wednesday without adopting any decision regarding its pumping. The current agreement between OPEC and its ten allied countries, including Russia, provides that joint production, after rising by 648,000 barrels per day in August, will total 43,306 million barrels per day (md) and will then remain unchanged until the end of year.
In theory, OPEC+ (without Venezuela, Iran and Libya, which do not participate in the agreement) would thus end up recovering the level of pumping it had before reducing it in 2020 by almost 10 mbd to face the historical collapse in demand and the prices of the “black gold” that caused the coronavirus crisis.
But given that most producers face serious technical difficulties in extracting what they have proposed, skepticism reigns among analysts that OPEC+ can deliver on its promises.
