(DCNF)—Lost in much of the discussion about the current global deficit of crude oil is a new reality that had been brewing for some time even before the Iran Conflict began on March 1: The fact that OPEC — and its bigger sister, OPEC+ — has lost its teeth.
Worse for its member nations, the most famous — and sometimes infamous — cartel of the 20th century has no obvious way to recover its bite.
Signals from key members have led to reports that OPEC+ plans to fully unwind what remains of the voluntary production quota cuts the group implemented during the post-COVID crisis years. Those reductions of several million barrels per day were intended to avoid a full collapse of global crude prices like the one seen in April 2020, when the West Texas Intermediate index price briefly traded in negative numbers as the global economy largely shut down.
OPEC+ saw the problem: There was too much oil production chasing too little demand and the cartel responded with agreed-to cuts by all members. When those reductions proved inadequate, eight of its bigger members beefed the program up with further voluntary cuts of their own.
The strategy was effective to some extent but lost its impact over time amid rising production levels from the United States, Guyana and other non-OPEC+ nations.
Throughout 2025 and the early weeks of 2026, it was obvious that the cartel really had little control over global crude prices, as the WTI index dropped to as low as $55/barrel in mid-January 2026. Again, OPEC+ members faced the reality that there was too much oil chasing too little demand on the market, and this time they had no effective way to address the matter.
Then came the war between the U.S. and Iran, and the equation radically reversed. OPEC+ has responded by gradually unwinding its millions of barrels in cuts, and now will apparently abandon what little is left at its Aug. 2 meeting, mainly because it has no other tool at its disposal. The problem there is that its Persian Gulf members — some of which, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — remain under attack from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and held hostage at various levels to the closure at the Strait of Hormuz.
They have little means to raise production regardless of any quotas theoretically imposed by their cartel.
Making matters worse, Saudi Arabia is now being impacted by the Iran-sponsored Houthi effort to shut down the Bab el Mandeb Strait at the southern exit to the Red Sea. The cartel’s largest producer has been bypassing the Strait of Hormuz problem by shipping as much as 7 million barrels of oil per day through its east-west Petroline Pipeline to the King Fahad Industrial Port at Yanbu.
That workaround had helped keep a lid on crude price spikes since March. The Houthi threat escalated overnight Friday when the Yemen-based Houthis claimed to have hit a major Saudi refinery at the port city of Jazan, which sits near Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen.
Should the Bab el Mandeb choke point remain effectively closed for an extended time, Saudi Arabia would be left to try to ship out as much of its production as possible northwards into the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal. But the Suez cannot accommodate fully loaded VLCCs, the largest class of crude tankers.
The other problem would be that Saudi tankers serving Asian markets would then have to transit the African continent to reach their destinations, adding about four weeks to their journey.
The Saudis also maintain access to the Sumed pipeline system, which cuts across Egypt to the Mediterranean. Sumed is a twin set of pipelines each with a capacity to move 1.25 million barrels per day. This all would radically complicate Saudi Arabia’s logistics, but oil does tend to find its way onto the market one way or another.
Back to OPEC+, what this all means is that its quotas and cuts to them have been rendered irrelevant to the market. Four years ago, the decision to fully unwind those cuts would have been major market news.
Now, it will be a blip on the screen, because it just doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. My, how times change.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.