The Iran war exposed a long-simmering feud within the world’s most powerful oil cartel, boiling over this spring when it contended with the biggest oil supply shock in history.
Now OPEC, the largest consortium of oil-producing nations, faces a fight for its existence.
The Strait of Hormuz has started to reopen, and some OPEC nations are clamoring to ramp up oil production to make up for lost time and sales. That’s reigniting age-old feuds about production quotas that already led the United Arab Emirates, one of OPEC’s most significant members, to leave the group in April.
OPEC is confronted with a critical choice: keep the group together and send oil prices into the ground, or drive profit higher and risk dismantling the nearly 70-year-old cartel.
While the rest of the world was scrounging around for any oil it could get this spring, the Middle East was awash in the stuff.
