Financial Energy Review
The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) will no longer use the International Energy Agency (IEA) as a source of data on its members’ crude output, after a vote of the producer bloc’s ministers.
Relations between the two bodies have rapidly deteriorated recently over climate policies and energy supplies, sources told S&P Global Commodity Insights.
But OPEC will still use its remaining five secondary sources, including S&P Global Commodity Insights and IHS Markit, both part of S&P Global, along with the US Energy Information Administration, Argus Media and Energy Intelligence.
Because OPEC’s decisions are usually based in hard facts, it averages production data from all of its independent secondary sources to track member output and assess compliance with quotas.
The decision came in an extraordinary OPEC meeting, held minutes after the organization and its allies, including Russia, rubber-stamped a 432,000 b/d production rise for May, against the lobbying of the IEA and the oil consuming countries that it represents for more crude supplies.
A delegate-level OPEC+ technical committee had already decided to stop including the IEA’s production estimates in its calculations on quota compliance, and the subsequent vote by the ministers means that all IEA data also will not be included in OPEC’s monthly oil market report calculations.
OPEC delegates said the organisation felt the IEA’s data has been tainted by anti-fossil fuel bias, particularly with the agency’s net-zero roadmap which said all new upstream investment should stop if climate change is to be contained.
