The head of the Oil Industry and Markets Division at the International Energy Agency (IEA) told CNBC that he believed both Russia and Saudi Arabia will continue to “pump as much oil as possible.” Ahead of the Doha talks that took place on April 17th, both countries had said they were willing to discuss freezing oil output, but less than a week later both have threatened to ramp up production.

“In the post-Doha world, when we’re still in what is essentially a free market for oil, they (the Russians) will pump as much oil out as the market will absorb and the Saudis have said much the same thing,” the IEA’s Neil Atkinson said. “We’re back to where we were before Doha where people produce what they can, sell what they can for whatever price they can achieve and the market takes care of the surpluses in time,” he added.

Atkinson was quoted by Yahoo Finance as saying that “as far as the Russians are concerned, even in the run-up to Doha when they were going to be party to an agreement to freeze production, they were actually pumping up production anyway.” Moreover, he noted that Saudi Arabia had spare production capacity (of up to 2m bpd) as well a couple of other Middle Eastern producers such as Kuwait and the UAE but that “apart from that there is no spare production capacity essentially anywhere in the world.”