Light, sweet crude oil prices on the New York market gained modestly to settle above $34/bbl on Mar. 1, and Russia state news agency TASS reported Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak said a “critical mass” of oil-producing countries had agreed to freeze oil production.

Exxon said it expected production in 2020 to be between 4m and 4.2m barrels of oil equivalent per day. That is lower than the projection Exxon set out a year ago, when it expected output would average 4.3m barrels per day in 2017.

Tesco reported revenue of $52.2 million for the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2015, down from $61.4 million, or 15%, in the third quarter of 2015 and down from $134.5 million, or 61%, in the fourth quarter of 2014. The sequential decline in revenue was primarily from lower activity and revenues in North America and Latin America for our rental and AMSS offerings.

Oil was up from the start of the week after data showing a slide in shale crude output and strong gasoline demand in the United States. Also bolstering prices was a meeting scheduled for mid-March by at least four major oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, to discuss a production freeze at January's highs.

Россия является надежным поставщиком энергоресурсов для Евросоюза и наши отношения являются взаимовыгодными.

“Times are tough, you’d almost call them brutal right now,” said Lamar McKay, BP PLC’s deputy chief executive. “But we will adapt. We will make it.”

Lake of fire or not, the oil market has certainly become increasingly alarmed by vast pools of excess crude stored in tanks around the world, with more added every day. At the conference, senior executives and officials outlined a path for prices that remains low in the short term, somewhat higher by year-end and subject to furious swings along the way.

Sparking fears for the long-term future of the industry, the UK upstream segment is expected to approve fewer than £1 billion in spending on new North Sea projects compared with an average of £8 billion/year over the past 5 years, according to Oil & Gas UK’s 2016 Activity Survey.

OPEC launched a price war against U.S. shale and other high-cost producers, including Canadian oil sands and Brazilian deep-water oilfields, in November 2014 by not reducing output despite a global oversupply. Since then, oil prices have plunged by more than half, hitting a 12-year low of about $26 on Feb. 11.

“We’ve worked out a common position,” Novak said, commenting on the deal. “We discussed various options, including doing nothing and cutting production.” An oil price at $50 a barrel is acceptable for exporters and consumers over the long term, he said. Brent crude, a global benchmark, traded at about $33 on Friday after dropping 45 percent over the past year.

“Russia will have to struggle for its market share one way or another,” said Andrey Polischuk, an oil and gas analyst at Raiffeisenbank AO in Moscow. Gazprom is gaining market muscle due to low oil now but may need changes to keep the price in line with competitors when crude rebounds, he said.

“The economy has held up surprisingly well when you consider the stresses on it” that include Western sanctions preventing banks and oil companies from issuing debt and imposing bans on high-tech oil equipment purchases, said Christopher Miller, Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Grand Strategy Program at Yale ISS. “The reason is that government policies since 2008 have been relatively effective,” he said in a Feb. 18 presentation at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela and Qatar conditionally agreed to cap their output at last month’s levels in order to halt a slide that has pushed oil prices to their lowest point in more than a decade. Oil prices recently plummeted below $30 a barrel, the lowest in 13 years.

Oil prices fell 4 percent on Friday, with Brent down a third straight week, as record high U.S. crude stockpiles intensified worries that a plan to freeze world output will do little or nothing to reduce massive oil supplies already in the market.

Saudi Arabia and Russia, the world’s two largest crude producers, agreed to freeze output after talks in Qatar.