Energy Minister Kanat Bozumbayev said at an industry conference in Istanbul over the weekend that Kazakhstan’s withdrawal from its pledge to the cap will take place gradually, Russian news agency TASS reported . Last November, members of OPEC and other oil-producing nations thrashed out an agreement to collectively reduce their daily output by 1.8 million barrels as compared to production in late 2016. The same countries later agreed to extend the deadline for that cap to March 2018 in a desperate bid to prop up prices. Asked if Kazakhstan would be prepared to consider a further extension during OPEC talks in November, Bozumbayev was evasive, answering only that “this is a question for November.” But the data on Kazakhstan so far shows Astana never really had its heart in it, and Bozumbayev even admitted the country’s oil output for 2017 will outshoot the previous projected volume of 81 million […]