IT WOULD TAKE A HEART OF STONE NOT TO LAUGH: OPEC is in a struggle for its survival. It could mean $40 oil.

OPEC countries with major operations in the Persian Gulf mostly struggled to get their crude out to their customers. Iran’s closure and America’s subsequent blockade of the Strait of Hormuz locked in a fifth of the world’s oil supply.

Several OPEC members – namely Iran, Iraq and Kuwait – had no choice but to shut in their crude production and wait.

Now that traffic in the strait has started to ramp up again, the jockeying for production quotas has begun. Iraq, the bloc’s second-largest oil producer, is reportedly the next shoe to drop – the country’s oil minister told Bloomberg that Iraq would have to decide whether or not to remain with OPEC if production targets don’t dramatically increase.

Iraq’s production was the hardest hit by the war, dropping by 75% to just over 1 million barrels a day in April and May – down from more than 4.5 million a day in January and February. Iraq wants permission to produce a record 5 million barrels a day coming out of the war, with a long-term aim of getting production up to 7 million barrels a day, Bloomberg reported.

At first I thought the OPEC nations were looking to take market share from Iran while they could. If they’re jockeying against one another, even better.