Baku, Azerbaijan, Jan. 14
By Dalga Khatinoglu – Trend:
Iranian parliament’s speaker, Ali Larijani says Saudi Arabia has been pushing oil prices down to prevent Iran from advantages and benefits of the nuclear deal reached with six world powers in July 2015.
He said Iran and the P5+1 (the US, the UK, France, Russia, China plus Germany) kicked off nuclear deal talks even before the start of Hassan Rouhani’s presidency in mid-2013, and even then Saudi Arabia was attempting to prevent a nuclear deal.
“However, after reaching the nuclear deal [in July 2015], Riyadh decided to lower oil prices to prevent Iran from nuclear deal advantages and benefits,” added Larijani.
Since mid-2014 until now, the oil price has decreased from $110 to $30, mostly due to glut, low global economy and oil demand growth.
Iran's crude oil export plunged from 2.2 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2011 to around one mb/d after sanctions were imposed by Western countries in mid-2012.
Iran says it is preparing to resume oil exports to pre-sanctions level in 2016, while OPEC's output has reached 31.7 mb/d in last year, about 2.3 mb/d more than demand volume for OPEC crude in the world.
Beside Iran, Iraq also wants to increase oil production by 0.3 mb/d to 4.5 mb/d in 2016.
Saudi Arabia produced 10.13 mb/d in November 2015, about 540,000 barrels per day more than the 2013 average.
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