Oil prices up by 0.17% to $58.53 on Thursday

Oil prices were up moderately on Thursday as trading was up $0.10 (+0.17%) at $58.53 per barrel, with the Brent benchmark trading up $0.44 (+0.70%) at $63.44 per barrel.
Report, however, has it that, at the end of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meeting in Vienna with ministers, approval for additional production cuts for Q1 2020 was agreed upon.

The cuts for the OPEC+ group which currently stand at 1.2 million bpd, will be increased to 1.7 million bpd, the sources said, per the monitoring committee’s earlier recommendation, which OPEC approved on Thursday.

Press releases surfaced earlier that Saudi Arabia and Venezuela had proposed the 500.000 bpd increase, but an official of Saudi later denied that the report, stating that there was no deeper cut being advocated by the kingdom.

Lagos business news however, gathered that deepening the cuts by 500,000 bpd should not at all be painful for the group but it will hardly be a cut at all, as they are currently over complying as a whole with the current level of the cuts anyway.

Saudi Arabia, who is said to have had enough of OPEC and OPEC+ cheating members has effectively carried the group to significant over compliance month after month, making up for non-compliant members including Iraq, Russia, and Nigeria.The group will now be faced with divvying up the extra production cuts and getting individual members to stick with whatever is agreed upon at the meetings.