The biggest loser in the oil deal agreed in Vienna is the OPEC cartel and the biggest winners are the non-OPEC countries, many of whom won’t even take part in the production cuts being organized by some non-OPEC countries led by Russian Federation.

A very simple number crunching would tell you, why the OPEC has been the biggest loser. Yesterday we discussed why Saudi Arabia isn’t shouldering the biggest of the cuts like it seems as it increased production by half a million barrels from the first quarter of 2016 when the cuts were first discussed in Doha meeting. Similarly, if we take 2012 as our reference point for measuring incremental production from both OPEC and non-OPEC, we see that production from non-OPEC countries rose by 5.5 million barrels per day, a large chunk of which came from the increased production in the United States. Compared to that, the production from the OPEC cartel rose by 1.44 million barrels per day.

So by a production cut of 1.2 million barrels OPEC is going back to production levels reached four years ago, while the production from the non-OPEC, especially in the United States would rise again.