The fractures within OPEC's precarioua
production cut agreement are
becoming increasingly more visible.

Following last weekend's report that
OPEC will invite Nigeria and Libya - two
cartel member states whose output
was not capped as part of the Vienna
agreement - moments ago Nigeria's oil
minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu has politely declined such an overture,
saying that his country will "miss" the
ministerial meeting in Russia on July 24,
adding that it will eventually find the
time to meet Saudi and Russian oil
ministers (just not now), and that his country has no set timeframe to join
OPEC oil production cuts.


And while Kachikwu said that Nigeria
will support a cap on its production, this
won't happen for a while: he said that
while his country is currently producing
1.7mmbpd of crude, it will (maybe?)
impose a cap only when it can stably pump 1.8 million barrels per day. He
also said that he will hopefully know in
"two to three months" whether oil
output has stabilized before agreeing
on production cuts. Faced with the prospect of even more
supply output out of Nigeria, oil is once
again on the back foot.