RPT-COLUMN-Oil diplomacy and the U.S. presidential election: Kemp - Reuters

RPT-COLUMN-Oil diplomacy and the U.S. presidential election: Kemp - Reuters:

Slower growth in petroleum consumption has intensified competition among the major oil producers and contributed to periodic volume wars and price slumps as they have fought for market share.

For now, the big three producers, Russia, the United States and Saudi Arabia, have reached a truce to stabilise prices during the COVID-19 pandemic and the deepest slump in oil consumption in the industry’s history.

But the truce is fragile and depends on substantial volumes of output from three other major producers, Venezuela, Iran and Libya, remaining off the market for the foreseeable future.

Civil war and U.S. sanctions have cut the combined output from these three producers by almost 5 million barrels per day compared with their respective peaks in the last two decades.