The Four Charts That Prompted An Oil Analyst To Declare The OPEC Deal A Failure

Two months ago we first suggested that OPEC may be fabricating data about its production cuts – and certainly overstating the “success” of the Vienna production cut deal – by looking at the rising Chinese oil imports, and by extension, rising oil deliveries by OPEC nations.

As JPMorgan wrote back in February, while IEA estimated the OPEC crude oil production fell by 1mbd to 32.06mbd in January, suggesting an initial compliance of 90% with the output agreement reached end 2016, the latest oil supply details released by China customs today suggest a reduction of supplies was not yet seen by China, the world’s largest oil importer.

In fact, quite the contrary: crude oil shipments from the 11 OPEC nations committed to a 1.2mbd output cut increased by 28% yoy, and more importantly, rose 4% from December 2016 – in a time when production was supposed to be declining – to 4.6mbd in January, accounting for 57% of China’s total oil imports.

Fast forward two months when Reuters analyst Clyde Russell looks at the same data and asks whether “it is time to call the crude oil output cuts by OPEC and its allies a failure?”

Echoing what we cautioned two months ago, Russell said that “certainly there is an increasing disconnect between the rhetoric of OPEC and other producers cutting output on the one hand and the reality of a well-supplied crude oil market and mixed signals on the level of global inventories on the other.”

The paradox: on one hand, OPEC and non-OPEC producer nations, including Russia, have been touting the high compliance with the agreement to reduce output by 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) from January to June. Having failed to boost the price of crude sustainably above $50, OPEC is now set to prolong the deal for another six months, with the announcement expected at a meeting scheduled for May 25. Needless to say, Russell is skeptical that merely extending what (N)OPEC tried before for another six months, will succeed.

When the deal took effect from Jan. 1, Brent traded in a narrow range for two months, before falling sharply in early March, but the support level of $50 held, with only a brief foray to an intraday low of $49.71 on March 22.

But Brent is once again testing the bottom of the post-agreement range, dropping to as low as $51.42 a barrel on Monday, as scepticism mounts over the ultimate effectiveness of the OPEC measures.