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OPEC+ Likely to Hold Oil Output Steady for November, Sources Say
OPEC+ is expected to leave its oil production targets unchanged for November when the group’s core members meet on Sunday, according to two people familiar with the discussions, extending a policy of caution that has now defined the alliance’s approach for several consecutive months.
Both sources, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said no final decision has been made ahead of the meeting. The gathering will bring together the seven core members that make up OPEC+’s inner decision-making group: Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Kazakhstan and Oman, meeting online rather than in person. A separate body, the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee, which reviews market conditions but doesn’t set policy itself, is also scheduled to convene the same day.
The timing of the meeting lands at an unusual moment for the group. Gulf members have spent recent weeks ramping up exports that spent much of this year disrupted by the war between the US, Israel and Iran, with shipments through the Strait of Hormuz climbing back toward pre-conflict levels as Saudi Arabia and others found workarounds to keep crude moving. Even with that recovery, most OPEC+ members remain well below the output levels their formal quotas would technically allow, a gap between paper targets and actual barrels reaching the market that has become one of the defining features of the group’s policy this year.
That gap is exactly why analysts have grown accustomed to treating OPEC+’s monthly output announcements with a degree of skepticism about how much they actually move the physical market. Jorge Leon, an analyst at Rystad Energy, said earlier this month that OPEC+ currently has very limited power over the physical oil market, since the group can adjust its production targets on paper without being able to guarantee that the corresponding barrels are actually produced or make their way to buyers. That dynamic has been especially visible throughout the Iran conflict, when several members’ actual output fell well short of their assigned targets simply because the conflict itself was constraining how much crude they could physically export, regardless of what OPEC+ had formally agreed to.
Sunday’s expected rollover would mark the latest step in a policy that has stayed remarkably steady since September, when OPEC+ kept its output levels for October unchanged from the levels already set for the prior month. That earlier decision came as the alliance said it needed to finalize new production quotas before deciding its next moves, work tied to a broader effort to reassess how much oil each member country can actually produce. US consultancy DeGolyer and MacNaughton has been commissioned to carry out that capacity assessment and is expected to submit its findings soon, a report that will directly shape the baselines OPEC+ uses to set output quotas starting in 2027.
That capacity review traces back to a decision the group made at the end of November last year, when OPEC+ agreed to pause output increases for the first quarter of 2026 and formally approved a mechanism for assessing each member’s maximum production capacity. At that point, the group still had roughly 3.24 million barrels a day of production cuts in place, equivalent to about 3 percent of global oil demand, made up of a 2 million barrel-a-day cut affecting most members through the end of 2026, along with the remaining 1.24 million barrels a day of a separate 1.65 million barrel cut that eight OPEC+ members had begun gradually unwinding back in October 2025. Those eight members had already released roughly 2.9 million barrels a day back into the market since April of last year as part of a broader push to regain market share after years of voluntary restraint.
By September of this year, OPEC+ had completed the full phased rollback of that 1.65 million barrel cut, effectively closing out one entire layer of the restrictions the group had maintained since 2023. What’s left now is largely a waiting game: OPEC+ has spent most of this year raising its collective output targets, only to hold them steady for both October and, if this week’s expectations prove accurate, November as well, pending the completion of the capacity assessment that will determine how the group structures quotas heading into 2027.
For oil markets, a steady rollover carries less weight than it might have in past years, given how disconnected official OPEC+ targets have become from actual production and export volumes during the Iran conflict. Traders have generally paid closer attention to physical indicators, tanker movements through the Strait of Hormuz, satellite tracking of loading terminals, and export data out of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf producers, than to the headline output figures OPEC+ announces at each monthly meeting. Even so, Sunday’s decision will offer a signal of how the group’s core members are reading the current balance between recovering regional supply and the unresolved question of how quickly to unwind the remaining production restraints still on the books.
Whatever the group ultimately decides, the more consequential decision still lies ahead, once DeGolyer and MacNaughton’s capacity report lands and OPEC+ has to translate those findings into actual 2027 quotas, a process that will determine how much additional oil the alliance is willing to bring back to a market that has spent most of this year defined by supply disruption rather than surplus.
