OPEC’s view of global oil demand growth was left unchanged as of today’s September Monthly Oil Market Report, at 1.3 million bpd for 2025, with non-OECD economies once again doing the heavy lifting. The OECD share of demand growth is negligible at 0.1 million bpd, while Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Latin America make up the balance.
For 2026, OPEC sees demand inching higher to 1.4 million bpd.
The supply figures, however, are more contentious. Producers outside the OPEC+ framework are set to add 0.8 million bpd next year and another 0.6 million in 2026, led by the U.S., Brazil, Canada, and Argentina.
Within OPEC itself, output in August jumped by just over half a million barrels per day to 42.4 million, according to secondary sources.
That production increase follows OPEC+’s latest quota tweak — a modest 137,000 bpd rise, the seventh straight monthly increase. Prices didn’t fall on the news; they rose. Traders saw the hike as more symbolic than real, with several members still producing below quota and others, like Iraq and Kazakhstan, forced to make compensation cuts. RBC’s Helima Croft noted that Saudi Arabia holds most of the spare capacity, with the UAE and Kuwait accounting for the rest. The headline number, in other words, looks bigger than the barrels that will actually hit the water.
It’s this gap — between paper and physical barrels — that explains why talk of a glut hasn’t knocked prices down. U.S. production growth is slowing, new Russian sanctions are in the works, and OPEC+ has left itself room to reverse course. Demand is steady but not spectacular, supply is rising but not as much as advertised, and the market is left trying to decide which side of the balance will blink first.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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