Washington-Sana
The features of the expected confrontation between the administration of US President Joe Biden and the OPEC Plus group have clearly begun to take shape, with the former preparing to announce pumping quantities of the US strategic oil reserve to curb the rise in oil prices in the United States.
The American Bloomberg Agency quoted informed sources, who did not reveal their identity, as saying that Biden will announce at a later time, “the withdrawal of more than 35 million barrels of oil from the strategic reserves of the United States, and this announcement will be in coordination with many other oil consuming countries such as India, Japan and South Korea.”
The agency pointed out that this step by major oil consumers is “to tame prices after the OPEC Plus countries rejected American calls to increase production significantly.”
On the other hand, sources in the OPEC Plus group said that member states "may adjust their production plans, allowing production to increase by more than 400,000 barrels per day during the next month if the oil-consuming countries proceed to use their strategic reserves of oil to reduce crude prices."
According to the sources, some OPEC Plus countries are not satisfied with the consuming countries' resort to strategic reserves that are supposed to be used in emergencies to reduce prices in global markets.
Democrats in the US House of Representatives urged Biden yesterday to move forward with the plan to withdraw oil from the US strategic reserve, at least temporarily, in an attempt to calm rising prices.
And the Biden administration had previously asked some of the largest oil consuming countries in the world, including China, India and Japan, to study the use of their crude reserves in a coordinated effort to lower prices and stimulate economic recovery.
This unusual request came as Biden resisted political pressure from high gasoline prices and other consumer costs, and the demand also reflected growing US frustration with OPEC and its allies in the OPEC Plus group, which rejected Washington's repeated requests to speed up its increases in oil production.
The US administration is trying to shock the markets at a time when inflationary pressures, which are due in part to the rise in energy prices, begin to cause political turmoil.
It is noteworthy that OPEC Plus is an agreement comprising 23 oil-exporting countries, including 13 member states of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and this agreement was reached in November 2016 with the aim of reducing oil production to improve oil prices in global markets.
Basma Kanon