Implicitly or explicitly Opec countries are battling with US oil producers over the commodity price. There is much evidence to suggest that given US production growth volumes – Gulf Coast output alone is up 1.9 million barrels per day since 2010 – and weak global demand, Opec could only marginally impact prices by cutting production.

Although painful in the short term, Opec producers with far lower conventional oil production costs than their often highly-leveraged, higher-production cost US counterparts are letting the chips fall where they may, confident in their ability to remain profitable once the dust settles.

“[OPEC] cannot continue protecting a certain price. That is not the only aim of OPEC,” said Suhail Mohamed Faraj al-Mazrouei, the UAE oil minister, at an energy event in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, as reported by the Wall Street Journal