Saudi Aramco will be selling its crude to all buyers next month, even as OPEC+ agreed to boost supply by more than what analysts expected.
Kpler’s Amena Bakr published the new Aramco price list on X, showing that the biggest price hike will hit buyers of Saudi crude in Europe. The hike across crude blends is $1.40 per barrel from July.
Asian buyers will have to pay between $0.90 and $1.30 more per barrel of Saudi crude next month, while buyers in North America will enjoy the most modest price hike, by between $0.20 and $0.40 per barrel.
Summer is peak fuel demand in the northern hemisphere and analysts expected Aramco to hike its oil prices whatever OPEC+ decided at its latest meeting. What OPEC+ decided at that meeting was to add 548,000 barrels daily to its output, prompting a price drop in oil when markets opened today.
At the time of writing, Brent crude was trading at $67.88 per barrel, with West Texas Intermediate at $66.14 per barrel, both slightly down from Friday’s close.
The latest output hike should result in the return of 80% of the total cuts—at 2.2 million bpd—agreed back in 2022, according to RBC Capital Markets’ Helima Croft. However, Reuters noted in a report on the news that actual production growth among the eight OPEC+ members that were cutting supply has been slower than agreed, and most of it has come from the biggest cutter, Saudi Arabia.
Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, was quick to predict another oversized OPEC+ output hike in September, at 500,000 barrels daily. The bank issued the prediction on Sunday, saying “Saturday’s announcement to accelerate supply hikes increases our confidence that the shift, which we started flagging last summer, to a more long-run equilibrium focused on normalizing spare capacity and market share, supporting internal cohesion, and strategically disciplining US shale supply, is continuing.”
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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