OPEC news

• Russia’s deal with OPEC to cut crude supply has not delivered the price boost it expected, according to Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich. While the accord late last year drove prices up in the weeks that followed, surging US production and swollen inventories have kept the average price for benchmark Brent crude below $55 a barrel. Russia had sought prices in a range of $55 to $60, Dvorkovich said at an Energy Ministry conference in Moscow on April 7. “Are these the results we could have expected? Probably a bit less than we’d like,” Dvorkovich said. “All the same, prices stabilized at a more advantageous level than they were previously.”
• Saudi Aramco has lowered its official oil selling pricing for the month of May for all grades to northwest Europe for the second straight month, along with all prices to the Mediterranean and some to Asia, against regional benchmarks. It raised the pricing of all sales to the US, according to its monthly price list published on April 5. The state-owned company lowered its official pricing for Arab Light crude to Asia by 30 cents, to 45 cents a barrel less than the regional benchmark.
• Iran’s oil exports are set to average 2.4 million barrels a day in the Iranian calendar year that started March 21, the state Islamic Republic News Agency reported on April 5, citing Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh.
• Libya plans to boost production from its Sharara oil field, one of its largest, to 270,000 barrels a day over the next few weeks, state-run National Oil Corp. said in an emailed statement on April 5. The country will still face “challenges” to boost national production to the target of 1.1 million barrels a day.
• Saudi Aramco plans to change the pricing benchmark it uses for sales to Europe, starting in July, according to a letter it sent to customers and published by media on April 4. The company will sell crude to Europe, Africa and Latin America based on ICE Brent Settlement, a one-day close for the benchmark, rather than the current system of using the daily weighted average of Brent trades. Both are published by ICE Futures Europe Ltd. In the letter to its European customers, Aramco said the “change is expected to provide substantive benefits, including allowing our customers to closely hedge crude purchases.”
• OPEC pumped 32.095 million barrels a day, down 200,000 a day from February, according to a Bloomberg News survey of analysts, oil companies and ship-tracking data. Supply from Nigeria and Libya dropped by a combined 210,000 barrels a day to 1.55 million and 620,000 a day, respectively, the survey published on April 3 showed. Among the 10 members bound by production caps, compliance weakened to 89 percent of pledged reductions from 104 percent, the survey showed. The output from OPEC’s biggest member, Saudi Arabia, edged higher in March to 10.01 million barrels a day but remained below its individual quota of 10.058 million a day.