LONDON—The OPEC+ group of oil-producing countries will meet on Thursday and are expected to agree to boost production in August in order to meet demand and dampen recent price rises.
While improvement in demand drove the group’s most recent rises in production, now price levels will also be a guiding force behind the club’s decisions.
After demand dropped when the coronavirus pandemic broke out last year and crude prices briefly turned negative, the club led by Saudi Arabia and Russia imposed sharp production cuts in order to raise prices.
The 13 members of OPEC and their 10 allies in the OPEC+ grouping were rewarded by seeing prices for the two contracts of reference, Brent and WTI, recover to around $75 per barrel, levels not seen since October 2018.
However that strategy has worked almost too well and the group is currently following a policy of cautiously turning the taps back on.
While on the face of it buoyant prices are a boon for producers—and some of them will be pushing to increase output to cash in—there are also risks.
Russia is expected to favor increasing output, as it has done at several recent OPEC+ meetings.
Moscow “may be more inclined to support a production increase in order to ensure a higher market share while limiting the risk of rising non-OPEC production,” according to Ole Hansen from Saxobank.
“Pressure will likely not only come from within the group, but there will also be growing calls from key consumers to cool the market down, as countries come out of the other side of COVID-19 lockdowns,” says Warren Patterson of ING bank.
India is a notable example. The world’s third-largest consumer of crude has been hit by a vicious coronavirus wave in recent months and has urged OPEC+ “to phase out crude output cuts to temper rising inflationary pressures,” noted Stephen Brennock from PVM.
“If prices remain this high, this will eat into consumers’ disposable incomes and potentially choke economic growth, which, over time, will weigh on crude prices,” explained Fawad Razaqzada of Thinkmarkets.
The OPEC+ states have left themselves some room for maneuver as they are currently still planning to leave 5.8 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude in the ground over the month of July that they could easily extract and sell.
Most investors are currently expecting a modest rise of some 500,000 bpd over the month of August.
But OPEC+ always has the capacity to surprise.