There are too many producers...OPEC only produces 30% of the global oil supply. The USA has proven that it can ramp up to meet large shortage in global supply v

There are too many producers...OPEC only produces 30% of the global oil supply. The USA has proven that it can ramp up to meet large shortage in global supply very rapidly with fracking. And there are _thousands_ of oil companies in the USA, so it's difficult to collude with all of them. Basically, OPEC needs a situation where they can reduce supply by 10% and get more than 10% increase in price. Otherwise they may increase the price, but still lose revenue overall. Over the past two decades they've tried this many times, but it hasn't worked. Russia and the US always increase production enough in response to keep the rise in prices relatively low. As oil is generally an inelastic commodity, they may be able to reduce their production by something appalling, like 2/3rds reduction. Then they would need, and probably actually get, a global oil price 3 times what it was previously in order to maintain revenue. However, previously that meant an oil price of $180-300/bbl which would in turn cause a global recession and reduce demand. Even if oil is very inelastic, at some point people would stop driving/flying/using energy. So really, there was no longer any way for OPEC to function as a cartel. The US effectively broke the cartel when it succeeded at being the new "swing producer" able to ramp up and down production in <6 months to meet global needs. This was all due to fracking and horizontal drilling. OPEC has been trying to work with Russia to establish a new "OPEC+" that might control enough market, but it's incredibly difficult to keep all players honest. And impossible in a coronavirus market where demand is down so much (no one is flying even with nearly free oil). Lastly, the US is starting to consider joining OPEC+. It's not something I previously thought was possible, because there's not one national petroleum company in the USA to negotiate with, there's thousands or tens of thousands of oil companies to negotiate with (some are just mom+pop oil companies which own two wells on an old plot in Pennsylvania, for example). However, just as we sometimes pay farmers not to farm, or pay dairy farmers not to produce milk, we are considering paying oil companies to leave oil in the ground: https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/493187-trump-adminsitation-eyes-paying-oil-companies-to-keep-crude-in-the https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/493187-trump-a... This would effectively be the US joining OPEC+ to artificially prop up the price of oil (and thus, subsidize the government budgets of Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other oil producing nations with American consumer's wallets). It does not seem to be a policy in serious contention, however. I don't expect the USA to follow through on these ideas.