Or once again is the world’s largest cartel over-promising and under-producing the goods?

So far a plethora of OPEC oil ministers have left their respective Viennese hotels with a chorus of optimistic statements that a deal will be reached at today’s meeting which begins imminently. However, the meeting holds the real prospect of no agreement being reached, or even the possibility that it could produce the results promised but that any accord is not far reaching enough to actually provide a bottom to the ailing oil market.

Non-OPEC Russia has staked its own involvement in a production cut deal on the condition that an agreement is reached by ministers today, therefore providing even more impetus for the group to at least reach some form of accord by the scheduled press conference at 3pm GMT.

That said, however, the unwillingness of many of the heavyweight producers to adhere to a production cut, most notably number 2 and 3 producers Iraq and Iran, have been the ongoing theme of negotiations so far and could well provide the spanner in the works of any implementation of the Algiers agreement over two months ago. A freeze is much preferred by the two beleaguered states as the former continues its conflict with IS and the latter recovers from international sanctions only lifted at the beginning of 2016 and which may soon be thrust back on the nation should US President-elect Trump go back on his predecessor’s nuclear agreement (with congress voting to reinstate the sanctions placed on it by the world’s largest economy).

Even OPEC mouthpiece Saudi Arabia, despite maintaining a relatively positive stance throughout the majority of the talks (both in Algiers and Vienna), has continually adopted a hardball approach in order to stiff-arm other producers into cutting. Most recently, the country’s oil minister Kahlid al Falih stated that even at current production levels the market will ‘stabilise in 2017’, suggesting that if his demands aren’t met he is happy for no deal to be reached. Understandable, given that his country is undergoing its largest economic upheaval in recent history to curb its reliance on oil output as the primary source of the county’s wealth.

Will OPEC manage to put their differences aside to agree to a meaningful cut in global oil production? Might the deal not go far enough to address the current glut? Perhaps the only agreement made today will be for yet another meeting in order to negotiate where the cuts will be made? Or that by the end of all of this the only thing that OPEC members can agree on is to disagree with one another, sending the price of oil back below $40?

Either way, we’ll find out in just a few hours time.

Henry Croft, Research Analyst, November 30