Who's your swing producer now?
Under pressure from Trump, Saudi Arabia has demolished the Opec deal and will now pour oil into a market that is suddenly running short
Late in the evening of 21 June, Bijan Namdar Zangeneh, Iran's oil minister, walked out of Opec's headquarters on Helferstorferstraße and rushed to the nearby Kempinski hotel. He unloaded on the waiting press pack, briefing Iranian journalists off the record. Iran would accept no deal to increase oil output at the next day's Opec meeting, he said. Doing so was tantamount to "suicide", he told the Iranian reporters. The Opec meeting seemed destined for an ugly confrontation, the climax of a week of high-stakes petro-diplomacy. While Zangeneh huffed, a crucial meeting carried on without him back in Opec's headquarters. The Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC), led by Saudi Arabia and R
Also in this section
13 March 2026
Brussels is again weighing a cap on gas prices amid the Hormuz crisis, but the measure could backfire by deterring the LNG cargoes Europe urgently needs
12 March 2026
Emergency oil stocks provide a last line of defence to oil market shocks, so the IEA’s unprecedented 400m bl release represents something of a double-edged sword
12 March 2026
LPG could rapidly expand access to clean cooking across Africa and prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths from indoor air pollution each year, but infrastructure shortages and regulatory barriers are slowing investment and market growth
11 March 2026
Missiles over Dubai and disruption in Hormuz are testing the emirate’s reputation—and shaking the energy hub at the centre of the Gulf economy
