UPDATE: Russia’s average daily oil output below 1.5 mln tns since Apr 1

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MOSCOW, Apr 7 (PRIME) -- Russia’s average daily oil output has amounted to less than 1.5 million tonnes since the start of April, Deputy Energy Minister Kirill Molodtsov told reporters on Friday.

“Daily output amounted to 1.501 million tonnes (as of Thursday), and it is even less since the start of the month,” Molodtsov said. “Everything goes in accordance with the plan defined by the minister.”

Energy Minister Alexander Novak said that global oil resources are falling and that the growth trend is over. “As you can see now, reserves on the world oil markets have been decreasing over the last two weeks and that this trend of reserve growth has been broken. This is a positive factor; we must track it and then decide on future steps in this context.”

OPEC states agreed to reduce their oil production by 1.2 million barrels daily to 32.5 million barrels in November 2016. Russia joined the agreement in December with a promise to cut output by 300,000 barrels daily compared with the level of October 2016. The agreement was concluded for January–June 2017 with potential prolongation.

Russia plans to reduce its oil production stage-by-stage. March output was to be cut by 200,000 barrels per day and April output by 300,000 per day as compared with October, 2016.

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