MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Angola quitting OPEC over dispute about oil production quotas

Angola holds untapped oil and gas resources estimated at 9bn barrels of proven crude oil reserves and 11 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves.

Angolan official media have reported from Luanda that Angola is leaving OPEC, following a meeting of the Council of Ministers, let by the president of the country, Joao Lourenco.

The announcement was done by Oil minister Diamantino de Azevedo. Apparently Angola and Nigeria clashed with the other cartel members before the latest meeting regarding their oil production quotas.

Angola, which joined OPEC in 2007, holds untapped oil and gas resources estimated at nine billion barrels of proven crude oil reserves and eleven trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves.

At a meeting in June, Angola and Nigeria were given lower crude oil production quotas as part of the OPEC+ agreement, after the two producers had underperformed and failed to pump to their quotas for years, due to a lack of investment in new fields and maturing older oilfields.

The most recent spat within OPEC about the African countries’ quotas was one of the reasons for the cartel to postpone its latest meeting within a few days.

African OPEC members Angola, Congo, and Nigeria were forced to commit to lower output in 2024, and the originally scheduled November 26 meeting could potentially have pressured them to make further production cuts, as the Saudis expressed discontent over compliance with the deal as it shoulders the bulk of the burden.

Before the meeting at the end of November, Angola said it was not considering quitting the cartel.

“There’s no thinking in that direction,” Angola OPEC governor Estevao Pedro said at the time, assuring markets that Africa’s second-largest producer had no intentions of rocking the boat to that extent.