"Divide and rule"... always rule one!

The writing is on the wall and writ large. The kingdom should focus on its future and what their world will look like when we transition away from fossil fuel. And no longer avoidable.

Saudi ought to ramp production as much as she can to both maintain market share and as she also ramps up production in her refineries to supply finished fuel to her end-user market.

Time to give the middleman market manipulator the flick and decide which market or allegiance serves her best interests, the resource-poor west or the oil-rich east.

The latter seeking major expansion policies via weaponised energy! Time to nail the colours to the wall and understand where your best future prospects lay.

Get on with maximised refinery production and the transport of refined fuel to any and all customers, on the clear understanding, this gravy train has at most, around thirty years of life.

And Saudi may well need to be a net importer of foreign oil by that time? Just to ensure her refineries operate at maximum capacity for as long as they can. To that end, need to be a price maker, not a price taker of crude!

That is only assured if production always exceeds demand and the Kingdom still has oil in the ground, or allow the world to believe there are still vast untapped and shallow reserves, i.e., western Iraq, as the ultimate price maker restraining tool!
Alan B.

For a moment, I thought this article may be about cutting people up, mincing their remains and dispersing them over the Mediterranean. That seems to be the Saudi contribution to modern civilisation. Apart from maintaining mass famine for millions in a neighbouring country, one of the poorest in the world. Wow, makes you want to become Muslim.

But no, it's about Saudi oil production. Wha ? Who gives a shirt whether or not Saudi feudalism survives another day ? With almost all of their work done for them by guest-workers, are the Saudis entitled to the slightest concern by anybody else ? Given that a quarter or a third of actual citizens - a minority of the population in a rent-seeking and bludging society - are Shi'ite rather than Sunni, that some sort of civil war is always bubbling just below the surface,

who cares ?

Joe