OPEC+ is cutting oil production again

By Around the Web

Nick Pope
Daily Caller News Foundation

OPEC+ announced a new round of cuts to oil production on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The oil cartel, which is responsible for about 40% of the world’s oil production, said that it would reduce production by an additional 1 million barrels per day, equivalent to about 1%of total global daily consumption, according to the WSJ. The fresh round of production cuts will likely keep oil prices at elevated levels as tensions remain high in the Middle East.

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The move “essentially shows the group wants to prevent the oil market from being oversupplied, keep control of oil market fundamentals and keep playing the role of central bank in oil markets,” Giovanni Staunovo, a commodity analyst at the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), told the WSJ. The cartel’s member countries reportedly disagreed about the size and distribution of the cuts, but the organization agreed in the end to move forward.

As part of the agreement, Saudi Arabia also will extend its 1 million barrel per day cut, which it announced initially in June, the WSJ reported. The cartel also invited Brazil to join its ranks, but Brazilian officials have reportedly not yet decided whether to accept the invitation.

Oil and gas prices in the U.S. have retreated from their high levels earlier this year and during the summer of 2022, but they still remain elevated relative to prices seen before the pandemic. Thursday’s announced cuts will likely keep oil prices between $80 and $90 per barrel for an extended period of time, market analysts told the WSJ.

Notably, that projected floor price is slightly above the Biden administration’s stated target price to purchase supply to refill the strategic petroleum reserve (SPR). President Joe Biden opted to release about 180 million barrels from the SPR in the months leading up to the 2022 midterm elections, but the vast majority of those sales have yet to be replenished.

The SPR’s low levels have come back into focus given the degree of geopolitical uncertainty in the Middle East as Israel wages war against Hamas. Some energy policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the SPR’s current condition leaves the U.S. more vulnerable to oil price shocks if the war boils over into a more widespread conflict.

Neither the White House nor the Department of Energy responded immediately to requests for comment.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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IMPORTANT NOTE TO WND READERS: Shortly after Hamas terrorists fired over 5,000 rockets from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and then proceeded to attack the Jewish state by land, sea and air – torturing, burning, beheading and murdering well over a thousand people, including women, children and infants, and wounding and abducting hundreds more – world reaction was, in its own way, almost equally shocking.

For after the biggest one-day mass slaughter of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, what followed was an outpouring of celebratory demonstrations, unbridled Jew-hatred, deliriously gleeful support for Hamas and bitter condemnation of the nation of Israel. Not just in the Arab-Muslim world, but throughout the Western world as well, including all across America.

Why? What is behind the explosion of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, pro-terror sentiment in the United States, where Israel has long been one of America’s closest friends and allies? Why are hordes of young “woke” LGBT demonstrators marching in support of Hamas – when Hamas wouldn’t think twice about binding and blindfolding them and throwing them off the roof of a tall building – as they routinely do in the Muslim world?

It turns out there’s one area of agreement that is so powerful, deep-seated and all-consuming that the vast differences between the deranged left and the murderous jihadists melt away into Kumbaya harmony.

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