What is OPEC, and what does OPEC+ do?
Five countries met in Baghdad in 1960 because oil companies kept cutting the price they paid. Their club still makes headlines.
▶ Start the storyOPEC is a group of oil-producing countries that work together to try to influence the global oil market, mainly by agreeing how much oil to pump. Its full name is the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. It was founded on 14 September 1960 in Baghdad by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and OPEC+ is a larger group of OPEC members and other oil-producing countries, formed in late 2016 to better control the global crude oil market.
38%
The 1960 founding had a trigger. In February 1959 the big multinational oil companies cut their for Venezuelan and Middle Eastern crude by 10 percent without asking the countries that owned the oil. Weeks later, at an Arab petroleum congress in Cairo, a journalist introduced Saudi Arabia's Abdullah Tariki to Venezuela's Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo. In a series of steps in the 1960s and 1970s the producing countries shifted control of oil production toward themselves and away from the dominant Anglo-American firms nicknamed the Seven Sisters.
The idea is simple: it is in the members' collective interest to limit supply and get higher prices. The catch is that each member is better off cheating and pumping more. Political scientist Jeff Colgan has argued that, since the 1980s, OPEC has largely failed to meet its goals, finding that members cheated on 96 percent of their commitments in an analysis covering 1982 to 2009. Economists often call OPEC a textbook , while members describe it as a modest force for market stabilisation.
OPEC+ widened the circle: it includes countries such as Russia, Mexico, Kazakhstan and Oman. In 2020, it cut the equivalent of about 10 percent of demand at the time, and in May 2025 it decided to start unwinding its production curbs, according to the International Energy Agency. The cheating problem has a cousin, quitting: on 28 April 2026 the United Arab Emirates, then OPEC's third-largest producer, announced that it would leave both OPEC and OPEC+ on 1 May 2026.
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Recap
Limiting supply helps every member, but each one gains by cheating, so the group's power is debated.
💡 A trick to remember it · A club agrees to pour less, so the price rises, but each member is tempted to top up its own glass.
Surprising fact · In 2022 OPEC accounted for 38 percent of global oil production.
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (20 claims) cites at least one of these.