Deputy Prime Minister and former Energy Minister Alexander Novak actually announced a sharp reduction in oil production in the second half of 2022. The MMI Telegram channel drew attention to the statistics.

During one of his speeches, Novak said that he expects oil production in Russia at the end of 2022 at the level of 500 million tons of oil, which, according to the channel's calculations, is just over 10 million barrels per day. However, the average production volume for the previous months was at the level of 10.6 million barrels per day, and the current production volume is 10.8 million barrels per day, so in order to reach the declared 500 million tons by the end of 2022, production must fall by more than a million barrels per day to 9.4 million barrels.

“Since we meet the beginning of the second half of the year at the level of 10.8 million barrels per day, it means that in order to have an average of 9.4, production will have to fall even lower. From the current 10.8 million, this is a crushing collapse,” the authors write.

In February 2022, Russia produced oil in the amount of 11.06 million barrels per day, but already in April, production sank to 10 million barrels. In May, commenting on the April drawdown, Novak argued that a new collapse would not happen. “I think that there will be a much smaller decline. We had a decline of just over a million barrels per day for just one month, now it is already lower. Accordingly, I think that further recovery will follow. We had 524 million tons last year. This year there may be 480-500 million tons. But this is today, everything can change depending on the situation,” the Deputy Prime Minister said before the introduction of the oil embargo by the EU.

EU sanctions on Russian oil are hurting budget revenues, but current oil prices offset the negative effect. Nevertheless, the level of oil production in Russia is critical to maintaining the OPEC + agreement; if Russia is not able to maintain the declared level of production, then the members of the cartel may intercept Russia's quotas or withdraw from the agreement altogether, as previously reported . Russia's oil production quota has been set at 10.549 million barrels per day since May 2022.

The MMI Telegram channel was created by economists Kirill Tremasov and Evgeny Suvorov, and in 2020 Kirill became the head of the monetary policy department of the Bank of Russia. The Central Bank regularly relies on forecasts and channel estimates in its analytics along with leading investment banks and think tanks.