Global oil prices have crashed. WTI crude is trading at under $30 per barrel, after Saudi Arabia declared a war of attrition against other producers by opening its spigots to flood the market. Since its own output cost is very low, it can afford low prices while higher-cost players suffer losses. Riyadh\u2019s aggression can be traced to its standoff with Russia, which on Friday appeared to snap ties with the Saudi-led Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Given the slump in oil demand caused by the outbreak of Covid-19, the oil cartel was pushing for coordinated supply cuts to reduce market supply and buoy prices. Moscow didn\u2019t play ball, and so Riyadh appears keen to punish it.<\/p>\n
Yet, all oil exporters are hurt by such a price crash, and so it\u2019s not clear how long this war will last. Nor can anyone predict the economic ravages of Covid-19. Fuel usage has already gone into a tailspin as travel plans get called off, and a revival could take months on end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Global oil prices have crashed. WTI crude is trading at under $30 per barrel, after Saudi Arabia declared a war of attrition against other producers by opening its spigots to flood the market. Since its own output cost is very low, it can afford low prices while higher-cost players suffer losses. Riyadh\u2019s aggression can be traced to its standoff with Russia, which on Friday appeared to snap ties with the Saudi-led Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Given the slump in oil demand caused by the outbreak of Covid-19, the oil cartel was pushing for coordinated supply cuts to reduce […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[139,130,187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-341162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-mint","category-newspapers","category-oil-gas-live-mint"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}