(WCTW) A Watershed Moment Is Coming For The Oil Market In 2026
The Saudis convinced the rest of OPEC+ to undergo an oil capacity audit. This is the watershed moment for the global oil market.
OPEC+ members have agreed to undergo an oil capacity audit that will help determine the production baselines for 2027. In our view, this is the watershed moment that will make the market realize just how low “real” spare capacity is. To highlight just how incredible the supply mismatch is, we created a table using OPEC and IEA crude production data going back to 2013.
We then took the maximum yearly production achieved by each respective country in the table above and compared it to their Q4 2025 production estimates:
As you can see, there are only 4 countries inside OPEC+ that are currently producing above peak production. As a matter of fact, if you look at the peak production achieved in most of these countries, 17 out of the 22 countries achieved peak crude production before 2020.
In our view, the production capacity report will be the single biggest watershed moment for the global oil market in 2026, and we will explain why this will catapult the structural oil bull market.