Opec and Russia reject Trump's call for an immediate increase in oil production

The OPEC leader in Saudi Arabia and his largest oil producer, Russia, ruled out any further increase in crude production on Sunday, pushing back US President Donald Trump's calls for action to cool the market.

"I do not influence prices," Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said at a meeting that ended without a formal recommendation to boost supply.

The benchmark Brent Oil LCOc1 hit $ 80 a barrel this month, prompting Trump to reiterate Thursday its demand for lower prices for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

The rise in prices results mainly from the decline in oil exports from Iran, a member of OPEC, because of new US sanctions.

"We are protecting the countries of the Middle East, they would not be safe for long without us, and yet they continue to push for ever higher oil prices! We will remember. The monopoly of OPEC must bring down prices now! , Writes Trump on Twitter.

Falih said Saudi Arabia had additional capacity to increase oil production, but no such measure was needed at the moment.

"My information is that markets are well supplied. I do not know of a refiner in the world who is looking for oil and can not get it, "said Falih.

Russian Minister of Energy, Alexander Novak, said that no immediate increase in production was needed, even though he thought that a trade war between China and the United States and US sanctions against the US Iran posed new challenges to the oil markets.

Pakistani oil minister Mohammed bin Hamad Al-Rumhy and his Kuwaiti counterpart Bakhit al-Rashidi told reporters that producers agreed on Sunday that they should focus on meeting production cuts agreed in June. .

This effectively means offsetting the fall in Iranian production. Al-Rumhy said the exact mechanism for doing so had not been discussed.

Trump's statement, on the other hand, was not his first criticism of OPEC.

Rising gasoline prices for US consumers could create a political problem for Republican Trump ahead of the mid-term congressional elections in November.

Iran, the third OPEC producer, accused Trump of orchestrating the oil price rally by imposing sanctions on Tehran and accused its main regional rival, Saudi Arabia, of giving in to pressure. US.

On Sunday, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said Trump's tweet "is the biggest insult to Washington's allies in the Middle East."

OPEC OUTPUT FALLS AGAIN

Seeking to reverse the downward trend of oil prices started in 2014, OPEC, Russia and other allies have decided in late 2016 to reduce their supply of about 1.8 million barrels per day.

In June of this year, however, after months of reduction from what their pact had demanded, largely because of the unintended cuts from Venezuela and other producers, they agreed to boost production by returning to 100 %.

This equates to an increase of about 1 million b / d, but the latest figures show that they are far from achieving this goal.

In August, OPEC and its allies reduced production by 600,000 barrels a day more than their pact, mainly because of declining production in Iran, as customers in Europe and Asia reduced their purchases before the deadline.

Iran told OPEC that its production was stable in August at 3.8 million bpd. OPEC's own estimates, according to secondary sources such as researchers and ship trackers, have established Iranian production at 3.58 million bpd.

Falih said the return to 100% compliance was the main goal and should be reached in the next two or three months.

Although it has refrained from specifying how this could be done, Saudi Arabia is the only oil producer with significant spare capacity.

"We agree that we need to offset the reductions and achieve 100% compliance, which means that we can produce much more than what we produce today when demanded," said Mr. Falih.

"The biggest problem is not the producing countries, but the refiners, the demand. In Saudi Arabia, we did not see the demand for extra barrels that we did not produce. "