If you ask an oil major what the last five years have been like, they would probably have something to say about price crashes and demand destruction. If you ask a large importer of crude, they’d have a completely different perspective. They may well praise price crashes that have allowed them to fill up on cheap crude, and they might even have a positive thing to say about the pandemic that brought prices to historic lows. And this is a problem for the world’s largest oil-producing cartel. OPEC, and its Russian and Central Asian partners in OPEC+, has been working for years to keep international oil prices higher by curbing production. Success has been mixed for reasons outside OPEC’s control. Still, it can certainly be said that the efforts of the oil producer’s club have mostly paid off: oil prices are now at a much more comfortable level than […]