Russia reiterates willingness to freeze its oil output ahead of technical meeting

Russia reiterated that it was willing to freeze its oil production in 2017, but cast a degree of doubt on its willingness to actually cut output ahead of a technical meeting between OPEC and non-member countries to try and reach an agreement.

According to Russia´s Energy Minister, Alexander Novak, a freeze would mean that the country would in fact be pumping between 200,000 to 300,000 barrels less than it had originally planned to do so in 2017.

In parallel, Azerbaijan’s Energy Minister Natig Aliyev reportedly told a newspaper that the oil cartel had asked non-members to slash their production by up to 880,000 barrels a day.

For their part, OPEC countries themselves were expected to try and reach a deal to reduce their own combined output to between 32.5m to 33.0m b/d from its current level in a meeting scheduled for 30 November in Vienna.

In October, the cartel´s average production stood at 33.64m b/d, according to secondary sources cited by OPEC.

Two days before the meeting in the Austrian capital, several non-OPEC countries, including Russia, Azerbaijan and Mexico were due to meet with experts from the cartel to try and reach a deal on production cuts.

As of 1130 GMT, front month Brent crude futures were edging higher by 0.18% to $49.04 per barrel on the ICE.