Who's your swing producer now?
Under pressure from Trump, Saudi Arabia has demolished the Opec deal and will now pour oil into a market that is suddenly running short
Late in the evening of 21 June, Bijan Namdar Zangeneh, Iran's oil minister, walked out of Opec's headquarters on Helferstorferstraße and rushed to the nearby Kempinski hotel. He unloaded on the waiting press pack, briefing Iranian journalists off the record. Iran would accept no deal to increase oil output at the next day's Opec meeting, he said. Doing so was tantamount to "suicide", he told the Iranian reporters. The Opec meeting seemed destined for an ugly confrontation, the climax of a week of high-stakes petro-diplomacy. While Zangeneh huffed, a crucial meeting carried on without him back in Opec's headquarters. The Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC), led by Saudi Arabia and R

Also in this section
2 May 2025
Fast-tracking US project approvals and increased trade pressures have already changed the LNG landscape since Trump came to office, with further transformation ahead
2 May 2025
Peru’s state-owned hydrocarbons agency has launched the search for new investors for Offshore Block Z-69, a high-potential asset in the prolific Talara Basin.
2 May 2025
The scars of the Russia crisis have accelerated Europe’s push to wean itself off gas dependence as the growing globalisation of LNG becomes a double-edged sword
1 May 2025
The NOC’s dire financial situation and maturing fields have left the authorities with little choice but to reduce crude expectations