Skip to content

Friday, Jun 5, 2020

Did Russia and Saudi Arabia collude to force the price of oil down?

Eric Smith, Gigafact Foundry
no

In early March, Saudi Arabia announced big boosts in oil production, launching "an all-out price war" against other producers. It did so on its own, after attempts to coordinate output with Russia failed. The coronavirus pandemic, meanwhile, had begun to spread through the West, reducing oil demand significantly. Platts, a well-known industry news service, called the move "doomed to fail."

By late April, oil traders began to worry about running out of storage capacity as headline oil prices briefly dropped below zero. By early June, Saudi Arabia and Russia had come round to an agreement to cut production and help stabilize prices. Oil prices recovered to a three-month high by June 3.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.