Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said the kingdom has met its promise to Washington to make up for Iranian crude oil supplies lost through U.S. sanctions.
“The request that America made to Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries is to be sure that if there is any loss of supply from Iran, that we will supply that. And that happened,” Prince Mohammed told Bloomberg Friday.
“Iran reduced their exports by 700,000 barrels a day, if I’m not mistaken. And Saudi Arabia and OPEC and non-OPEC countries, they’ve produced 1.5 million barrels a day. So we export as much as two barrels for any barrel that disappeared from Iran recently. So we did our job and more.”
Russia and Saudi Arabia struck a private deal in September to raise oil output to cool rising prices and informed the United States before a meeting in Algiers with other producers, Reuters reported this week.
U.S. President Donald Trump has blamed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for high crude prices and called on it to boost output to bring down fuel costs before the U.S. congressional elections Nov. 6.
Benchmark Brent oil rallied above $86 this week mainly stemming from a decline in oil exports from OPEC member Iran because of fresh U.S. sanctions. It settled at $84.16 a barrel Friday.
Iran, OPEC’s third-largest producer, has accused Trump of orchestrating the oil price rally by imposing sanctions on Tehran and accused its regional archrival Saudi Arabia of bowing to U.S. pressure.
Saudi Arabia is the world’s top oil exporter and OPEC’s de-facto leader.