A dozen U.S. Republican Senators are urging the world’s top oil exporter Saudi Arabia to review plans to significantly boost oil supply to the market and lower oil prices while the world is grappling with the coronavirus pandemic.

In a letter to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, the 13 Republican Senators led by Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota said that the extremely volatile and unsettled global oil market with plunging oil prices is “an unwelcome development.”

“The United States has been a strong and reliable partner to the Kingdom for decades. In light of this close strategic relationship, it was greatly concerning to see guidance from the Kingdom’s energy ministry to lower crude prices and boost output capacity. This has contributed to a disruption in global oil prices on top of already hard-hit financial markets,” said the Senators, mostly representing oil producing U.S. states such as Alaska, Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, and Louisiana.

The Saudi-Russian oil price war in the wake of the OPEC+ deal collapse is largely viewed as a war for market share and an effort to push U.S. shale producers out of the picture as very few of them make any money at $30 oil.

“Senior Saudi government leaders have repeatedly told American officials, including us, that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a force for stability in global markets. Recent Saudi actions have called this role into question. We urge the Kingdom to assert constructive leadership in stabilizing the world economy by calming economic anxiety in the oil and gas sector at a time when countries around the world are addressing the pandemic,” the U.S. Senators wrote in their letter to the Saudi Crown Prince.

Earlier this month, U.S. shale tycoon Harold Hamm was said to be preparing to file an official complaint against Saudi Arabia with the U.S. Department of Commerce, after the Kingdom promised to unleash a flurry of crude oil into the markets, sending oil prices into a tailspin.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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