The Oil Mystery Behind Saudi Arabia’s Production Cut
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,
Saudi Arabia surprised the world by helping to engineer an unexpectedly strong agreement from OPEC members to cut production by 1.2 million barrels per day, followed by additional cuts from non-OPEC members. While the two agreements incorporate cuts from a wide range of oil producers, Saudi Arabia will do much of the heavy lifting, cutting nearly 500,000 barrels per day and even promising to go further than that should the markets warrant steeper reductions.
Depending on one’s perspective, Saudi Arabia demonstrated its diplomatic prowess and made OPEC relevant again, succeeding in talking up oil prices without sacrificing much. After all, Saudi Arabia often lowers production in winter months. Other analysts look at it a different way – Riyadh was actually pretty desperate for higher oil prices, given the toll that the two-year bust has taken on the country’s economy. That led Saudi Arabia to shoulder most of the burden of adjustment, achieving only small concessions from other OPEC members, most notably Iran. Riyadh was the big loser of the deal, the thinking goes, but ultimately had no choice as the government needed higher oil prices.
There are arguments to made for both sides, but then there is a third possibility: Saudi Arabia was motivated to pullback because it was actually leaning on its oilfields too hard this year when it pushed output up to 10.7 million barrels per day, an output level that might have strained the reservoirs of some of its largest fields. Producing too aggressively can ultimately damage the long-term recovery of oil reserves. Reuters reports in an exclusive report that Saudi Aramco could have been pushing its oil fields to the limit this year, and had little choice to but to climb down from record high output levels.
Saudi Arabia has long maintained that it could ratchet production up to 12 mb/d or more if it wanted to, but such a massive rate of production has never actually been proven or even tested. Reuters raises the possibility that Saudi Arabia might not actually have the ability to go that high. A source told the news organization that Saudi Aramco might only be able to produce at 11.4 mb/d, and going beyond that level would require billions of dollars in new investment in several years of development.
But making the enormous investments needed to take its production capacity up to 12 mb/d at a time when government coffers are depleting led Saudi officials to the conclusion that it needed to take a breather, sources told Reuters. With its oilfields feeling the strain, Saudi Arabia saw an urgent need to dial back output a bit, which made it particularly determined to strike a deal with fellow OPEC members. The prospect of higher oil prices ultimately made the promised production cuts seem like much less of a sacrifice.
The question surrounding how much oil Saudi Arabia can ultimately produce if it completely opened the taps is not an academic one. Saudi Arabia is the one country …read more
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