The Reference News Website reported that according to the report of Spanish website the Economist on August 1st, the main characters of the oil market have changed qualitatively in a decade. The decrease of the price of the crude oil may be the most striking fact since mid-2014. The rapid development of the American oil industry and some other factors have broken the monopoly ofSaudi Arabiaand other countries on the oil price, which is one of the reasons why the crude oil price has decreased. The new situation makes the price of the crude oil controlled by the market and the production cost.

The American oil production has risen by 80% compared with 2008, whileSaudi Arabiahas only risen by less than 10%. The oil data plan and the data from US Energy Information Administration show that the daily production of the crude oil ofRiyadhhas increased from 9.1 million barrels to about 10 million barrels. Comparatively speaking, the American daily production of the crude oil has increased from about 5.1 million barrels to more than 9.41 million barrels. The daily production has risen by 4.3 million barrels on average.

“The Recent Development and Prospect of the Oil Market” released by the Bank of Spain on August 1st2017 shows that the structure of the oil market has changed drastically because in recent years the American oil industry has carried out the deep transformation and the OPEC has taken strategic countermeasures.

This report emphasizes that the unconventional oil revolution is the root cause of this kind of market transformation. The revolution is the result of the combined effects of the high oil price and the development of the oil extraction level, the drilling technology and the hydraulic fracturing technology, which leads to a large amount of exploitation of the natural gas and the oil. And the traditional ways of exploitation in the past are not economically feasible.

Although the report focuses on the analysis of the rapid development of the American oil industry and especially the dramatic increase of the unconventional resources, other experts also think that the new structure of the market is the result of the combined effect of the positive change of the oil supply and the negative change of the oil (consumption) demand. These changes are closely related to the sudden weakening of global economic activities and its influence on the change of the demand is ever greater.

OPEC has put an end to the strategy of producing oil without limit and decreasing oil price to push out the less competitive manufacturers. Now it is trying to act as the stabilizer of the supply and the price once again, but the result remains to be discussed.