According to two delegates familiar with the matter, major OPEC+ member countries are likely to stick with their plan to keep crude oil production quotas unchanged for next month when they meet this weekend.
These delegates said the group, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia — which has nominally completed the reversal of its 2023 production cuts — will probably approve the existing roadmap and maintain production targets unchanged in November.
The OPEC secretariat in Vienna and Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Energy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Although oil supply disruptions in the Middle East caused by the Iran war are showing signs of recovery, millions of barrels of production in the region remain offline.
This has rendered the series of production increase targets agreed upon by OPEC and its allies since the conflict broke out largely symbolic. This round of production increases allowed the group to formally unwind its 2023 output cuts — though only on paper.
Delegates said the group has a roadmap that will not restore another batch of output paused in 2022 at least until the end of the year.
Even restarting this production capacity would be fraught with difficulties: due to a combination of insufficient investment, sanctions, and various production outages, the capacity of many OPEC+ member countries is declining year by year, making it difficult to restore output to earlier levels.
OPEC+'s policy direction for 2027 also depends on the results of member country capacity assessments. This assessment will be completed this week and submitted to oil ministers for review at the formal ministerial meeting on November 29.
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