Middle Eastern oil producers hiked their March-loading formula prices on the back of tight inventories and strong demand. The divergence between OPEC’s self-reported production figures and third-party assessments continues to widen, suggesting its members are stalling production. Unlike Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait rely on spot assessments to price their European cargoes, which could hurt demand for their products. When OPEC+ agreed on its 400,000 b/d monthly increases back in August 2021, the overwhelming expectation for the first months of 2022 was a gradual return to normality, with key Middle Eastern crude producers ramping up production to almost pre-pandemic levels. Fast-forward to today and the world is facing a completely different picture – inventories are the tightest in almost a decade, with the pace of stock depletion unparalleled in recent decades. The same key Middle Eastern powerhouses have played a part in this, underperforming their production quotas – in […]