What every OPEC+ member produced in July 2026, what it was supposed to produce, what it could produce, and the 1.09 mb/d of cover that stands behind a 101.5 mb/d world.
Spare capacity is the single most important number in oil and the one least often quoted. It is the reason a supply outage can be a headline in one year and a crisis in another with the same barrels lost. This page carries it alongside the production it is measured against, so the ratio can be read directly rather than taken on trust.
Prepared by The Baratelli Institute · publication date September 10, 2026. Every figure below carries its own measurement date, which is set by whoever measured it and is often older than this page.
OPEC+ crude oil production, July 2026, in million barrels per day. Source: IEA Oil Market Report, published August 12, 2026 (OPEC+ crude oil production table). Capacity used is computed on this page as July production divided by sustainable capacity.
| Country | Group | June 2026 mb/d | July 2026 mb/d | Implied target | July vs target | Sustainable capacity | Capacity used July 2026 | Effective spare |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saudi Arabia | OPEC | 7.34 | 8.24 | 10.35 | -2.11 | 12.11 | 68.0% | n/d |
| Iraq | OPEC | 2.41 | 2.88 | 4.38 | -1.50 | 4.87 | 59.1% | n/d |
| Iran | OPEC (cut-exempt) | 2.30 | 2.63 | n/d | n/d | 3.80 | 69.2% | n/d |
| Kuwait | OPEC | 1.46 | 1.74 | 2.64 | -0.90 | 2.88 | 60.4% | n/d |
| Nigeria | OPEC | 1.51 | 1.44 | 1.50 | -0.06 | 1.42 | 101.4% | 0.00 |
| Libya | OPEC (cut-exempt) | 1.34 | 1.35 | n/d | n/d | 1.28 | 105.5% | 0.00 |
| Venezuela | OPEC (cut-exempt) | 1.08 | 1.12 | n/d | n/d | 1.00 | 112.0% | 0.00 |
| Algeria | OPEC | 0.98 | 0.97 | 1.00 | -0.03 | 1.00 | 97.0% | 0.03 |
| Congo | OPEC | 0.27 | 0.29 | 0.28 | 0.02 | 0.27 | 107.4% | 0.00 |
| Gabon | OPEC | 0.24 | 0.20 | 0.18 | 0.03 | 0.22 | 90.9% | 0.02 |
| Equatorial Guinea | OPEC | 0.04 | 0.04 | 0.07 | -0.04 | 0.06 | 66.7% | 0.03 |
| Russia | Non-OPEC OPEC+ | 8.86 | 8.76 | 9.82 | -1.06 | 9.40 | 93.2% | 0.64 |
| Kazakhstan | Non-OPEC OPEC+ | 1.88 | 1.55 | 1.61 | -0.05 | 1.80 | 86.1% | 0.25 |
| Mexico | Non-OPEC (excluded from compliance) | 1.38 | 1.37 | n/d | n/d | 1.50 | 91.3% | 0.13 |
| Oman | Non-OPEC OPEC+ | 0.85 | 0.83 | 0.83 | 0.00 | 0.80 | 103.8% | n/d |
| Azerbaijan | Non-OPEC OPEC+ | 0.44 | 0.44 | 0.55 | -0.11 | 0.44 | 100.0% | 0.00 |
| Total OPEC | 18.96 | 20.91 | n/d | n/d | 28.91 | 72.3% | 0.07 | |
| Total non-OPEC OPEC+ | 14.04 | 13.62 | 13.68 | -1.43 | 14.80 | 92.0% | 1.02 | |
| Total OPEC+ | 33.00 | 34.53 | n/d | n/d | 43.70 | 79.0% | 1.09 |
Definitions, because these columns are routinely confused with one another. Implied target is the production level the country's OPEC+ commitment implies for the month; countries exempt from the cuts — Iran, Libya, Venezuela — have none, and Mexico is excluded from the compliance calculation. A negative figure in July vs target means the country produced below its target, which in July 2026 reflects damage and blockade rather than restraint. Sustainable capacity is the maximum level the IEA judges reachable within ninety days and holdable for an extended period; it is a judgement, not a measurement, and it is the number that moves most when an analyst revises. Effective spare capacity is narrower still: capacity that is both reachable and actually available, which excludes crude shut in by sanction or damage. Cells read n/d where the source does not publish the figure.
The United Arab Emirates does not appear. The published table for July 2026 does not carry a UAE line, and its listed components fall short of its stated OPEC total by approximately the amount that line would hold. A UAE figure could be produced here by subtraction; it is not, because a number obtained by residual and printed in the same column as measured figures is indistinguishable from a measured figure to every subsequent reader and every machine that scrapes this page.
OPEC+ produced 34.53 mb/d in July 2026 against sustainable capacity of 43.70 mb/d, which is 79.0% of capacity in use. Read alone, that sounds like ample headroom — roughly nine million barrels a day of it. It is not headroom, and the reason is the distinction in the paragraph above: most of the gap is crude that is shut in by war or sanction and cannot be summoned by a decision. Strip that out and effective spare capacity is 1.09 mb/d. Against global supply of 101.5 mb/d, that is 1.07%.
Inside that, the OPEC-8 group — the members that hold and manage the voluntary cuts, and the group the market watches for a supply response — carries effective spare capacity of 0.07 mb/d. Eight of the world's largest producers, coordinating deliberately, between them hold less than a tenth of a million barrels a day of usable cover. For most of the last two decades the equivalent figure ran between two and four million.
What this means in practice is that the market has lost its shock absorber. When spare capacity is three million barrels a day, an outage is a logistics problem: someone opens a valve and the price moves a few dollars. When it is one, an outage is a price problem, because the only remaining adjustment mechanism is demand, and demand adjusts through price. That is the mechanism behind a $126 Brent print and behind a 35% weekly move in West Texas Intermediate, the largest since the contract began trading in 1983. The barrels lost were not unprecedented. The absence of anything to replace them was.
Production is a monthly observation for July 2026. Sustainable capacity is a standing judgement that is revised occasionally and carries no monthly date of its own. The capacity-used column therefore divides a July number by an assessment made at an unstated earlier point, and the ratio is only as current as the slower of the two. It is printed because it is useful and labelled because it is not clean.
The same caution applies with more force to any reader tempted to compare capacity-used figures across countries. A country whose fields were damaged in July 2026 still carries its pre-damage capacity assessment until someone revises it downward, which makes its utilisation look voluntarily low. It was not voluntary.
The United States is not an OPEC+ member and does not appear in the table above. It is also the largest crude producer in the world, so a global production reference that omits it is not a reference. These figures run on an annual clock rather than a monthly one, which is stated in each row.
| United States series | Figure | Measured | Source | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US crude oil production, 2024 actual | 13.3 mb/d | calendar year 2024 | EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook, released September 9, 2026 (forecast completed September 3, 2026; next release October 6, 2026) | Carried for the trend rather than the level: the run from 13.3 to 13.7 to a forecast 13.8 is what the two rows below are measuring against. |
| US crude oil production, 2025 actual | 13.7 mb/d | calendar year 2025 | EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook, released September 9, 2026 (forecast completed September 3, 2026; next release October 6, 2026) | A record, and the highest annual crude output any country has ever produced. Note that this is an actual that moved: the August 2026 edition carried 13.6 mb/d for 2025, matching what the December 2025 edition had forecast, and the September 9, 2026 edition revises it to 13.7. A completed calendar year is not a settled number while the underlying survey data is still being revised, which is the reason this reference dates its actuals as carefully as its forecasts. |
| US crude oil production, 2026 forecast | 13.8 mb/d | 2026 forecast, completed September 3, 2026 | EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook, released September 9, 2026 (forecast completed September 3, 2026; next release October 6, 2026) | About 100 kb/d above 2025 on the revised base, rising to 14.3 mb/d in 2027. A forecast, not an observation. Two supersessions are worth keeping in view. The December 2025 edition forecast 13.5 mb/d for 2026 and a decline of roughly 100 kb/d — the opposite direction — before the Strait of Hormuz disruption. And the August 2026 edition put 2027 at 14.2 mb/d against this edition's 14.3. The 2026 figure itself has not moved since August; what moved beneath it is the 2025 base, so the same 13.8 now describes a smaller increase than it did a month ago. |
| Permian Basin, 2025 actual | 6.6 mb/d | calendar year 2025, as forecast in December 2025 | EIA, Today in Energy, December 12, 2025 (Short-Term Energy Outlook, December 2025) | Retained on its original vintage and labelled rather than swapped. The December 2025 edition expected the basin essentially flat in 2026 and 6.5 mb/d in 2027; that expectation predates the 2026 disruption and has not been re-measured here. |
The forecast rows are forecasts. They are included because the direction is the interesting part — American output is projected to decline slightly in 2026 from a record 2025, and the Permian, which supplied the entirety of the last decade's growth, is projected flat — but a forecast is not an observation and this page does not present it as one.
The relevant comparison is with the spare-capacity discussion above. American production responds to price, but through drilling, and drilling responds on a lag of quarters, not days. It is not spare capacity in the sense the IEA measures, and it cannot be. That is the subject of the rig count ledger, where the response to a $126 price turns out to be smaller than anyone would predict.
Our reading is that the market spent the decade after 2014 learning the wrong lesson. American shale did behave like a swing supplier through that period, and the conclusion widely drawn was that the era of spare-capacity scarcity was over — that price spikes would be self-correcting because a rig count could rise.
July 2026 is the test of that proposition and it did not hold. The reserves exist, the capacity exists on paper, the price signal is emphatic, and effective spare capacity is 1.07% of demand. What the last decade actually built was a supply source with a fast financial response and a slow physical one. In a disruption measured in weeks, a response measured in quarters is not a response.
Prices, the supply and demand balance, refining, the two-clock rule and the plain-English glossary that serves all 13 ledgers.
Back to the hub →LedgerWhere every cent of a $4.48 gallon goes — crude, refining, distribution and tax — with each of the four components on its own clock and three of the four defined differently from how a reader assumes.
Open the ledger →LedgerSeventy-six years of crude prices deflated to constant July 2026 dollars. The 2008 records are still records in real terms and today's are not close.
Open the ledger →LedgerOne central bank, one date, one fixing time. A dollar barrel converted into 29 currencies without mixing thirty sources and thirty clocks.
Open the ledger →LedgerWhat the shape of the curve does to inventory and why it drives storage behaviour rather than describing it — then the full strip: 63 listed WTI months from the exchange's own Daily Bulletin, $96.05 front against $72.60 a year out, $23.45 of backwardation, open interest printed beside every settlement.
Open the ledger →LedgerTwo entirely different questions that share one word. The price a well needs and the price a treasury needs, kept rigorously apart — with the gaps in each named.
Open the ledger →LedgerAll 41 countries the OPEC bulletin itemises, ranked, with share of world total and reserve life computed two ways. Venezuela first at 303.701 billion barrels; the United States ninth with a reserve life of 8.4 years.
Open the ledger →LedgerThe seven countries that hold the voluntary cuts — not eight, and not the full membership — their August and September 2026 decisions, and why quota discipline is currently the wrong lens.
Open the ledger →Ledger588 rigs turning in the United States, 449 drilling for oil, 1,907 worldwide. A forty per cent move in price has produced a 1.4 per cent move in the American count.
Open the ledger →LedgerCapacity measured on two clocks five months apart, crack spreads computed from same-week legs in both units the market quotes, and the one undated figure on this reference, labelled as such.
Open the ledger →LedgerDiesel at $5.967 a gallon, a nominal record and not a real one. Why distillate is tighter than gasoline, and why distillate fuel oil is not diesel.
Open the ledger →LedgerCommercial crude one per cent above its five-year average in the same week the Strategic Petroleum Reserve reads 39.3% of capacity and its lowest since November 1982. The two facts are causally linked.
Open the ledger →LedgerEight passages, six years of flows each, and bypass capacity that covers under a quarter of Hormuz. Plus what the industry itself expected in April, measured, and how wrong it was.
Open the ledger →Provenance. Reserve figures are transcribed from the OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin; production, spare-capacity, stock and refining figures from the International Energy Agency Oil Market Report; United States production, refinery capacity and inventory figures from the Energy Information Administration; rig counts from the Baker Hughes North America and Worldwide rig counts; benchmark prices from published daily quotes. Each row names its source and the date the figure was measured. Where a figure was not published, or where a published series does not itemise a country, the cell reads n/d rather than carrying a fabricated estimate. Derived quantities — reserve life, shares of world total, capacity utilisation, spare capacity as a share of supply — are computed from the figures shown and are not separately sourced; they inherit the measurement dates of their inputs, and where the two inputs run on different clocks the page says so. The Baratelli Institute is a publisher operating under the Lowe v. SEC publisher exception. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security or commodity. Figures change; verify against the primary source before relying on any of them.