U.S. oil production will continue to grow at a rapid pace until 2025, while Venezuela’s crude output is set for further declines, Fatih Birol, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), has said in Istanbul.

In its Oil Market Report last week, the IEA noted that the Big Three of oil—Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States—are now the dominant players on the oil market with their combined liquids production accounting for as much as 40 percent of the world’s total.

“While the US was not present in Vienna, nobody could ignore its growing influence,” the IEA said, commenting on the Saudi/Russia led OPEC/non-OPEC meeting in the first week of December.

“As production grows inexorably, so will net imports decline and rising US exports will provide competition in many markets, including to some of the countries meeting in Vienna last week,” the IEA said last Thursday.

In its December Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) expects U.S. crude oil production to have averaged 11.5 million bpd in November, up by 150,000 bpd from October, thanks to platforms resuming normal operations after hurricane-related outages in October. EIA sees U.S. crude oil production averaging 10.9 million bpd this year, jumping from 9.4 million bpd in 2017. The forecast for next year’s U.S. crude oil production currently stands at 12.1 million bpd.

Meanwhile, according to OPEC’s secondary sources, Venezuela’s crude oil production continues to plunge—by another 52,000 bpd from October to stand at 1.137 million bpd in November. To compare, Venezuela’s oil production averaged 2.154 million bpd for 2016 and 1.911 million bpd for 2017.

According to the IMF, Venezuela’s economy will collapse by 18 percent this year, while inflation is expected to be at 1,370,000 percent.

The economic collapse adds to years of mismanagement and underinvestment in the oil industry to further complicate attempts in Venezuela, one of OPEC’s five founding members, to stop the steep decline of its oil production.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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