https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/seeking-punish-cheaters-saudi-arabia-pushes-opec-open-oil-taps-2025-04-04/

Reuters

Seeking to punish cheaters, Saudi Arabia pushes OPEC+ to open oil taps

Summary
Saudi Arabia seeks to punish cheaters - three sources
Oil falls 8% below $65 per barrel, lowest since 2021
Move revives memories of oil price wars of 2014, 2020
Production hike, oil price drop to appease Trump

LONDON, April 4 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's anger at Kazakhstan and other over producing nations was the key driver behind a shock decision by the OPEC+ oil group to open taps on Thursday and might not be reversed even if oil prices fall further, three OPEC+ sources told Reuters.
Saudi Arabia has been an aggressive supporter of production control to balance the market in the last five years as its budget requires oil prices of around $90 per barrel. Thursday's decision represents a major departure from those policies.

For the past several months, Saudi Arabia has been pushing Kazakhstan and Iraq to improve compliance with production cuts, threatening to otherwise start ramping up its oil output.
Instead, Kazakhstan showed record pumping figures month after month as U.S. firms Chevron and Exxon Mobil expanded production at the key field in the country. Iraq was slow to curtail its volumes too.
The warning shot to the cheaters was fired a month ago, when OPEC+ decided to start modest monthly production increases to the tune of 130,000 barrels per day from April against market expectations it would keep output steady.

But as cheating worsened over the past month, Saudi Arabia fired a bombshell by pushing the OPEC+ group to release 411,000 bpd into the market in May, three times more than expected and representing around 0.4% of global supply.
On Friday, oil prices plunged 8% to below $65 per barrel, their lowest since the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in 2021, on U.S. tariffs, China's retaliation to U.S. tariffs and OPEC+ decision to speed up production hikes.

OPEC+ might take no action to reverse steep output hikes even if oil prices drop below $60 per barrel, one of the three OPEC+ sources familiar with Thursday's discussions said. He asked not to be named due to sensitivity of discussions.
A second source familiar with the deliberations on Thursday said the message from Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman was that members needed to stick to their targets or more production increases would follow.

OPEC+ and the Saudi energy ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The first source said low prices would hurt nations both inside and outside OPEC+ and hence all producers would take actions one way or another to limit production.
All three sources said they would not call Thursday's production increase a price war yet even though it has revived memories of Saudi Arabia's clash with Russia for market share in 2020 and OPEC's clash with U.S. shale in 2014-2015.