According to the recent research conducted by Bloomberg, OPEC’s oil production reached a new high in September 2016. To be more specific, OPEC is reported to have been producing 33,75 million barrels a day over the reporting period.
The record high production of crude oil within the scope of cartel has to do with considerable production growth seen in Libya and Nigeria over the reporting period. For those of you who don’t know, the similar data taken for the previous month report 33,24 barrels a day, which means that OPEC’s oil production increased by as much as 170 thousand barrels a day in a matter of 4 weeks.
The increase took place mainly thanks to the mentioned production hikes in Nigeria and Libya by 190K barrels a day and 340k barrels a day respectively. At the same time, Angola and Saudi Arabia saw their production shrink a little bit 40K and 60K barrels a day respectively. As for Iran, local oil companies only increase their production by 10K barrels a day, all the way up to 3,63 million barrels a day.
However, this seem to be the end of it, at least for the near future. OPEC members are not going to set new production highs in the coming months. The thing is that they reached an agreement to cut their production in order to back a stronger market. This happened on September 28th, during the unofficial summit in Algeria.
All in all, the cartel decided to cut the total production from 33 million down to 32,5 million barrels a day. For now, this is all we know about the agreement. Still, this agreement is yet to be signed officially during the forthcoming official summit this fall. They say that Nigeria, Libya, and Iran are the only OPEC members to be allowed to avoid production cuts since their production used to be limited for years. They will still be producing crude oil at the same level, but if they decided to increase it, this is definitely going to be capped.