Shipments of Iranian Oil Surge Well Above UN Limit

Abdalla Salem El-Badri, Secretary General, OPEC

Abdalla el-Badri, Secretary General of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced this past Wednesday plans to absorb additional crude oil output from Iran, Iraq and Libya this year.

“There is no problem for OPEC to absorb any production increment from Iraq and Iran in 2014,” commented Badri. “When Libya output comes back, we will accommodate it because its production is in our numbers.”

Iran is testing their boundaries however.

According to an IEA report released yesterday, imports of crude oil from Iran increased by 240,000 bpd to 1.65 million barrels per day.  Reuters reports this is the highest such level since June 2012.

This is also 650,000 barrels per day above the limit agreed to in a deal with the United Nations to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

The Secretary General noted that global oil demand will increase by 1.1 million barrels per day in 2014 and OPEC will produce up to 30 million barrels of crude oil a day for the rest of the year according to a report today by the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC).

Iranian crude exports, excluding to Japan, reached 1.28 million barrels per day (bpd) in March and included sales to top buyers such as China and India as well as South Korea, Turkey and Syria, based on a report by Reuters.

The report quoted an informed source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying that there has been an increase of about 14 percent in Iran’s crude exports to India in March, as compared to February.

The crude exports were around 1.4 million bpd in February.

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