Venezuela and Iran suffered the most from U.S. oil restrictions, where daily production fell by almost three million barrels. With Russia, everything turned out the other way around – production increased to 10.7 million barrels per day, which is how it turned out that Washington’s sanctions came to hand in Moscow, RIA Novosti reports.
Olga Lebedinskaya, an assistant professor at the Economics Department of the Russian Economic University named after G.V. Plekhanov, calculated that one-third of the world’s oil reserves and one-fifth of production are under U.S. sanctions. She explains that world oil reserves are 1.66 trillion barrels, of which 298.4 billion are in Venezuela, 157.8 billion in Iran, and 80 billion in Russia.
“If you add up the oil resources in these countries, their share will be 51% of the top 30 countries-leaders in reserves and almost 33% of global reserves. When Qatar enters the sanctions list, which left OPEC in 2018 and supports Iran, this figure will reach 34%,” said Lebedinskaya.
The worst sanctions-hit was Venezuela: daily production fell 3.3 times, to 0.75 million barrels.
“If the country mined 2.82 million in 2015, it would now be in eighth place,” Lebedinskaya comments.
Iran’s losses are less: 2.1 million barrels are being produced there so far. As for Russia, the result was the opposite: production rose to 10.7 million barrels per day.
As noted by Oleg Bogdanov, a leading analyst at the QBF investment company, no direct oil sanctions, according to the Iranian model, were introduced against Russia. If this happened, world oil prices would soar above $ 100 per barrel.
“Yes, and it is impossible to do this since the main consumer of our oil is Europe, Europeans cannot refuse our raw materials, as this will cause serious economic problems: rising inflation, higher rates and, ultimately, a recession,” the analyst said.
Back in 2017, three years after the imposition of sanctions, the American The Wall Street Journal admitted: restrictions did not have a significant impact on the Russian oil industry. Moscow continued to introduce new technologies in the energy sector and increased production.
This was facilitated by large-scale investments of previous years, significant tax benefits for oil companies and the devaluation of the ruble. The development of new deposits has begun – Novopokrovsky, Messoyakhsky, Yarudeisky, Prirazlomnoye, Filanovsky, Trebs and Titov. These projects more than compensated for the decline in production in the fields of Western Siberia, which have been operating since the times of the USSR.
