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The fate of the first global oil deal in 15 years could be decided on Wednesday when OPEC members travel to Iran to persuade the country to participate in a deal to freeze output levels, possibly by offering Tehran special terms.

Dominant OPEC power Saudi Arabia and non-OPEC Russia, the world's top two producers and exporters, agreed on Tuesday to freeze production levels but said the deal was contingent on others joining in - a major sticking point with Iran absent from the talks and determined to raise production.

OPEC member Iran, Saudi Arabia's regional arch rival, has pledged to steeply increase output in the coming months as it looks to regain market share lost after years of international sanctions, which were lifted in January following a deal with world powers over its nuclear programme.

London (CNN Business)OPEC has agreed to pump more crude oil over the next two months as Russian production begins to drop because of Western sanctions.

The oil exporters' cartel said it would increase supply by 648,000 barrels per day in July and August, 200,000 barrels per day more than scheduled under a supply agreement with other producers, including Russia, known as OPEC+.

Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, hit $125 a barrel on Tuesday, its highest level since early March.

The sharp pullback came with an implicit promise that as factories reopened and planes returned to the air, the oil industry would revive, too, gradually scaling up production to help economies return to prepandemic health.

Members of the cartel OPEC Plus, which agreed to cut output by about 10 million barrels a day in early 2020, are routinely falling well short of their rising monthly production targets.

Production in the United States, the world’s largest oil producer, has also been slow to recover from its one-million-barrel-a-day plummet in 2020, as companies and investors are wary of committing money amid climate change concerns and volatile prices.

. At stake is the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ production limits, which are among factors helping the oil market’s monthslong recovery.

Mohammed Barkindo, the secretary general of Opec, said there was a growing mass mobilisation of world opinion against oil, which was “beginning to … dictate policies and corporate decisions, including investment in the industry”

He said the pressure was also being felt within the families of Opec officials because their own children “are asking us about their future because … they see their peers on the streets campaigning against this industry”.

“Thank you! Our biggest compliment yet!” tweeted Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish initiator of the school student strike movement, which continues every Friday.

FOR MUCH of the past half-decade, the operative word in the energy sector was “abundance”. An industry that had long sought to ration the production of fossil fuels to keep prices high suddenly found itself swamped with oversupply, as America’s shale boom lowered the price of oil around the world and clean-energy sources, such as wind and solar, competed with other fuels used for power generation, such as coal and natural gas.

In recent weeks, however, it is a shortage of energy, rather than an abundance of it, that has caught the world’s attention.

Britain’s miffed motorists are suffering from a shortage of lorry drivers to deliver petrol. Power cuts in parts of China partly stem from the country’s attempts to curb emissions. Dwindling coal stocks at power stations in India are linked to a surge in the price of imports of the commodity.

If oil stays around $50 a barrel, most countries in the region will run out of cash in five years or less, warned a dire report from the International Monetary Fund this week. That includes OPEC leader Saudi Arabia as well as Oman and Bahrain.

Low oil prices will wipe out an estimated $360 billion from the region this year alone, the IMF said.

audi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, needs to sell oil at around $106 to balance its budget, according to IMF estimates. The kingdom barely has enough fiscal buffers to survive five years of $50 oil, the IMF said.

blocs start to align in what looks like a new world energy order. 

“This represents the biggest re-drawing of the energy and geopolitical map in Europe — and possibly the world — since the collapse of the Soviet Union, if not the end of World War II,

The outcome, he said, could be “a sequel to the Cold War.”

U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged to send Ukraine more advanced rocket systems and munitions to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield. The White House had been hesitant to send the weapons, which have long been requested by Kyiv.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described Russian bombing in the front-line eastern city of Sievierodonetsk as “insanity” given the presence of a large-scale chemical plant.Residents of Sievierodonetsk have been warned not to leave bomb shelters due to the risk posed by toxic fumes.

“We believe that the U.S. is deliberately pouring oil on the fire. The U.S. is obviously holding the line that it will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian,” Peskov told reporters, according to Reuters.His comments echo those made by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov who had claimed President Joe Biden’s administration increased the risk of direct clashes between Moscow and Washington by supplying rockets to Ukraine.— Sam Meredith

Speaking to the RIA Novosti news agency, Ryabkov said of U.S. foreign policy that “the remnants of a responsible, sound approach to the situation have simply been scrapped.”

By 2020, the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. has already overtaken Russia as the world’s leading gas producer. Fuel has become America’s largest export item. Within five years, according to a study by Citigroup, North America could be energy independent. “OPEC will find it challenging to survive another 60 years, let alone another decade,” Edward Morse, Citigroup’s researcher, told CNBC.

Joel Kotkin identified America’s epicenters of economic dynamism in a study for the Manhattan Institute. It is like a giant arc of unfashionableness. You start at the Dakotas where unemployment rates are at microscopic levels. You drop straight down through the energy belts of the Great Plains until you hit Texas. Occasionally, you turn to touch the spots where fertilizer output and other manufacturing plants are on the rebound, like the Third Coast areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Northern Florida.

the revolution in oil and gas extraction has led to 1.7 million new jobs in the United States alone, a number that could rise to three million by 2020. The shale revolution added $62 billion to federal revenues in 2012. At the same time, carbon-dioxide emissions are down 13 percent since 2007, as gas is used instead of coal to generate electricity.

While I don’t know how Obamacare will turn out, I’m certain that my two favorite Obama initiatives will be transformative.

His Race to the Top program in education has already set off a nationwide wave of school reform, and his Race to the Top in vehicles — raising the mileage standards for American-made car and truck fleets from 27.5 miles per gallon to 54.5 m.p.g. between now and 2025 — is already spurring a wave of innovation in auto materials, engines and software.

they are the future of progressive politics in this age of austerity: government using its limited funds and steadily rising performance standards to stimulate states and businesses to innovate better economic, educational and environmental practices.

Russia and Saudi Arabia have been longtime adversaries over geopolitics and military operations in the Middle East. Now, they've formed a surprising bond that is reshaping global oil markets. As two of the world's largest oil producers, they have engineered significant production cuts to mop up an oil glut that had been keeping energy prices low for years. The unexpected alliance is one of the reasons motorists in the U.S. have seen prices at the pump climb 18 percent over the past year.

"What is surprising is they've managed to put aside a history of political distance or even political animosity to find common cause around economics," said Meghan O'Sullivan, a professor of international affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School. "It's one of the most interesting geopolitical developments to happen in the last few years." Saudi Arabia and Russia putting political differences aside for the goal of financial gain is one thing. Making it work in the global oil market is another. Joint efforts to control oil prices have floundered in recent decades. Analysts say that OPEC's ability to coordinate and manipulate prices has been overwhelmed by cheating among members and by the bounty of shale oil produced in the United States. Russia is not an OPEC member. But in December 2016, it made a de

It's unclear what leverage, if any, the White House has to undo the Saudi-Russia agreement. Gasoline prices are rising, never a happy fact for a president, though at an average of $2.81 a gallon they're still moderate by historical standards. But if gas blows past $3 and heads toward $4 a gallon, it could become a hot issue in the midterm elections.

SEOUL (Reuters) - Oil prices kicked off the new year higher on Thursday as warming trade relations between the United States and China eased demand concerns, while rising tensions in the Middle East fueled worries about supply.

Both benchmarks ended higher in 2019, posting their biggest annual gains since 2016, buoyed at the end of the year by a thaw in the prolonged trade dispute between the United States and China - the world’s two largest economies - and a deeper output cut pledged by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies.

A fall in U.S. crude inventories last week also supported prices. U.S. crude stocks fell 7.8 million barrels in the week ended Dec. 27, compared with analysts’ expectations for a decrease of 3.2 million barrels, according to data from the American Petroleum Institute (API) released on Tuesday. [API/S]

“It feels like we’re definitively in a new era,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser in the Obama White House. “The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us. And we’re not sure what’s next.”

The attack by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on his neighbor has become a prism through which nearly all American foreign policy decisions will be cast for the foreseeable future, experts and officials said.

In the near term, Russia’s aggression is sure to invigorate Mr. Biden’s global fight for democracy against autocracies like Moscow

It was only at the end of April that Russia cut gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, the first two victims of its energy-pressure campaign. But overall gas shipments are at less than one-third the level they were just a year ago. In mid-June, shipments through Nord Stream 1 were cut by 75 percent; in July, they were cut again.

“It is wartime,” Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at Columbia, told her colleague Jason Bordoff, a former adviser to Barack Obama, on an eye-opening recent episode of the podcast “Columbia Energy Exchange.”

I think there’s been a gradual and growing recognition that we are headed into the worst global energy crisis at least since the 1970s and perhaps longer than that.

John Kenneth Galbraith assessed the trajectory of America’s increasingly “affluent society.” His outlook was not a happy one. The nation’s increasingly evident material prosperity was not making its citizens any more satisfied. Nor, at least in its existing form, was it likely to do so

One reason, Galbraith argued, was the glaring imbalance between the opulence in consumption of private goods and the poverty, often squalor, of public services like schools and parks

nother was that even the bountifully supplied private goods often satisfied no genuine need, or even desire; a vast advertising apparatus generated artificial demand for them, and satisfying this demand failed to provide meaningful or lasting satisfaction.

U.S. gasoline prices are plunging just in time for Thanksgiving, and with the OPEC Plus oil cartel in apparent disarray, they could be heading lower for Christmas.

The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline on Wednesday was $3.28, about 6 cents less than a week earlier and 27 cents less than a month ago.

Prices have dropped below $3 a gallon in more than a dozen states