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
16 January 2026
The country’s global energy importance and domestic political fate are interlocked, highlighting its outsized oil and gas powers, and the heightened fallout risk
16 January 2026
The global maritime oil transport sector enters 2026 facing a rare convergence of crude oversupply, record newbuild deliveries and the potential easing of several geopolitical disruptions that have shaped trade flows since 2022
15 January 2026
Rebuilding industry, energy dominance and lower energy costs are key goals that remain at odds in 2026
14 January 2026
Chavez’s socialist reforms boosted state control but pushed knowledge and capital out of the sector, opening the way for the US shale revolution
