April 19, 2019
Oil Minister Bijan Namdar-Zanganeh wants to keep oil prices around $60 a barrel to avoid encouraging US shale oil production, he told The Wall Street Journal in an interview just one year ago.
This month, the price of an OPEC barrel rose above $70.
“If the price jumps [to] around $70,… it will motivate more production in shale oil in the United States,” Zanganeh said at Now Ruz last year.
Zanganeh told the Journal Iran would press for a higher quota for itself. It then was pumping just a little above its quota of 3.8 million barrels per day (bpd). Zanganeh said it could produce about 100,000 bpd more. With Trump sanctions, it now pumps about a million barrels less than quota.