Washington: The United States believes the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (Opec) decision to continue increasing production was “not right,” US Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs Amos Hochstein told Bloomberg on Friday.
“At the end, they’ve done what they needed to do and announced that they are going to continue to increase production,” Hochstein said. “We don’t think that right. The president doesn’t ask the other people to do the work that we should.”
On Thursday, US President Joe Biden authorised a record release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in the amount of one million barrels per day for the next six months amid increasing gasoline prices in the United States.
Biden said the United States has received commitments from other countries to release tens of millions of additional barrels into the market in order to lower the prices.
The White House also said that it will impose fees on US energy firms that sit on idle oil wells to make extraordinary profits from a supply crunch.
Meanwhile, the Opec+ group of 32 oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia and steered by Russia approved a modest addition of 432,000 barrels per day (BPD) in output for the month of March.
The Opec+ has been sticking to monthly increments of around 400,000 BPD despite the global market being in a deficit of anywhere from 5-6 million barrels daily, especially after the US ban on Russian oil and other Western sanctions that have impacted energy exports from Russia.
Biden ordered the release of 50 million barrels from the SPR in November and 30 million earlier this month, in coordination with the releases from other countries, including China, Japan, India, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
