Saudi Arabia registers 21-month low oil exporting

Saudi’s crude oil export stood at 6.957 million barrels per day in February 2017, as compared to 7.713 million barrels per day in January. However, this is while Saudi Arabia’s crude oil output has increased from 9.748 million barrels per day in January to 10.011 million barrels per day in February 2017.

Notably, Saudi Arabia has undertaken the largest cut in oil output (486,000 barrels per day) among the participants of the OPEC deal signed last year in Vienna. In December 2016, OPEC and non-OPEC producers reached their first deal since 2001 to curtail oil output jointly and ease a global glut after more than two years of low prices.

Interestingly, Saudi Arabian Oil was planning an 80-day maintenance work at its Riyadh refinery starting in late February to last through mid-May and therefore



crude exporting is trimmed. The refinery has capacity to process 120,000 bopd.

Importantly, Saudi plans to double its refining capacity to as much as 10 MMbpd within 10 years, Saudi Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih has said. Saudi Arabian Oil, the state producer known as Saudi Aramco, expects to start operating a 400,000 bpd refinery next year at Jazan on the Red Sea, adding to two other plants of the same size that have come online since 2013.

Non-OPEC oil producers such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Oman, Russia, Sudan, and South Sudan agreed to reduce output by 558,000 barrels per day starting from Jan.1, 2017 for six months, extendable for another six months. OPEC agreed to slash the output by 1.2 million barrels per day from Jan. 1.