Biden just left Russia and Saudi Arabia phone: strengthen coordination under the OPEC+ mechanism!

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman recently "broke his heart" over oil prices, and as soon as the front foot sent away US President Biden, who wanted to stimulate Saudi Arabia to increase crude oil production, the back foot Crown Prince spoke on the phone with Russian President Putin, emphasizing the importance of
strengthening coordination under the "OPEC+" mechanism.

Xinhua News Agency reported on July 21 that according to information released on the Russian presidential website, the leaders of Russia and Saudi Arabia gave a positive assessment of the development level of bilateral friendly relations during the phone call and discussed key issues of bilateral cooperation, especially the expansion of mutually beneficial economic and trade cooperation
.

Saudi Arabia and Russia discussed the current situation in the global oil market, stressed the importance of strengthening coordination under the "OPEC+" mechanism, and both sides stated that relevant members of "OPEC+" have always fulfilled their obligations to ensure the necessary balance and stability
of the global energy market.

The so-called OPEC+ mechanism means that in addition to OPEC members, it also includes other oil resource countries, including Russia, Mexico, Malaysia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Brunei, Oman, Bahrain, Sudan and South Sudan and other 10 countries
.
OPEC members and the above-mentioned non-OPEC members have established the OPEC+ alliance mechanism, with the goal of stabilizing international oil prices
by regulating oil production through the joint development of production quota systems by the member states.

From the perspective of petroleum resources, OPEC+ mechanism members account for a huge proportion of global petroleum resources, with oil reserves accounting for nearly 90% of the world, oil production accounting for nearly 60%, and oil exports accounting for 66%, which shows that this mechanism plays an important role in
stabilizing the international oil market.

The call between Putin and the Saudi crown prince stressed the importance of strengthening coordination under the "OPEC+" mechanism, and the implication seems to confirm once again that the outside world believes that it has a negative attitude of
increasing production alone outside the framework.
As the media has previously commented, Saudi Arabia has neither plans to "stop engaging with Russia" nor "help the United States" by extracting more crude oil
.

On the 15th of this month, Biden held talks in Saudi Arabia with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and others, Biden's intention is clear, hoping that the country will increase production to stabilize the price
of crude oil that has risen due to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
Although the meeting did not disclose the specific policy of increasing production, Biden said after the meeting that he expected to take "additional measures"
to promote production increase in the coming weeks.
However, the market response is honest, and the crude oil market is once again higher, which means that the view that Saudi Arabia will not increase production significantly is strengthening
.

The day after the talks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told the outside world that Saudi Arabia has the "ability" to increase domestic crude oil production capacity to 13 million barrels per day, but there is no additional capacity to continue to increase
crude oil production.
This means that Saudi Arabia's current oil production is almost at its limit
.
An earlier Wall Street article noted that the 13 million barrels target could take five years to achieve
.

It is worth noting that the world's largest oil exporter Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's oil imports in the second quarter of this year increased by 100% year-on-year, and in the case of most of Saudi Arabia's own oil exports, imported fuel is mainly used for power generation to meet summer cooling and other needs
.
Media reports said that from April to June this year, Saudi Arabia imported 647,000 tons (48,000 barrels) of fuel from Russia every day through Russian and Estonian ports, an increase of about 100% year-on-year (320,000 tons/day in the second quarter of last year).