about its upcoming visit to the Middle East and, more specifically, Saudi Arabia. He even said, as reported by Politico, that he was not going to ask the Saudis for more oil. And yet it seems that few believe this.
This is where Biden is quite wrong. It is not in the Gulf oil kingdoms' interest to pump more. Most of them do not have any spare capacity, and the couple that do may have seriously overestimated that spare capacity. And this includes Saudi Arabia. The problem with estimates is that they often tend to rely on insufficient information, including information supplied by the country with the spare capacity. But there is, in fact, no hard, verifiable data on Saudi Arabia's or any other OPEC member's spare production capacity. No OPEC member isto report its spare capacity, and there is no way for the figures that they do report as spare capacity to be verified.
So, on the one hand, Saudi Arabia is quite unlikely to have the resources needed to boost production in any meaningful way that would have an impact on international prices in the immediate term. But it also probably does not want to.The thing about spare capacity in oil production is that it can be tapped in case of an emergency. But there is no oil emergency right now, not according to Riyadh.