A bipartisan group of US senators said on Wednesday that it has reintroduced a bill to put pressure on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to stop cutting production.
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, in addition to others from the Judiciary Committee, reintroduced the law called “No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels” or (NOPEC).
If the committee, the Senate and the House of Representatives pass the bill and President Joe Biden signs it, NOPEC would change the US antitrust law to withdraw the sovereign immunity that protects members of the OPEC + group and its national oil companies in lawsuits over price collusion.
Several attempts over more than two decades to pass (NOPEC) concern Saudi Arabia, the de facto leader of “OPEC”, which prompts Riyadh to press hard every time the bill is presented.
The committee passed the bill by 17 votes to four last year after OPEC +, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, agreed to cut production by two million barrels per day, but did not take other measures.
“An oil organization and its members should know that we are committed to stopping their monopolistic behavior,” Grassley said.
“The current law has rendered the Department of Justice powerless to prevent the 13 largest oil-producing countries from manipulating prices and increasing costs,” Klobuchar said.
And OPEC continued to reduce its production by two million barrels per day, setting a minimum for global oil prices, as the global benchmark Brent crude is trading at about $ 82.60 a barrel today, Wednesday.
Russia said it cut its production by 500,000 barrels per day in March after the Group of Seven, the European Union and Australia set a price ceiling for Russian seaborne crude oil exports at $60 a barrel, in response to its war in Ukraine.
OPEC did not indicate that it would increase production, and an Angolan official told Reuters at the “Cera Week” conference in Houston that there was no need to compensate for the production difference due to the Russian production cut.
