OPEC+ set to strengthen its hand
The alliance looks to bolster market management credibility by bringing greater clarity and unity to output cuts and producer capacity later in 2026
OPEC’s production allocation policy is undergoing its most significant change since the group was established in 1960. It shifts the emphasis from politically negotiated production baselines to a technically based, audit-driven system centred on the maximum sustainable capacity (MSC) metric for the OPEC+ alliance, which includes the original OPEC members and a group of non-OPEC partners led by Russia. For many years, the main disagreement within the group has been the setting of “reference production” levels used to determine supply cuts or increases. The gap between declared quotas and actual production capacity has widened over time, leading to a credibility deficit that risks undermining
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