Why is the oil price so low? What is behind this?

China and other countries are buying less oil. There is a glut of oil.on the market so the price falls.

The Arabs are dumping oil on the market to try to drive out some of the competition along with the lack of demand.

Saudi Arabia and opec from my understanding is watching prices slump. traditionally they would curb production as a price control but they are increasing or stabilizing production as supply continues to increase with the specific intent of driving down oil prices for the next 6-18 months. this way they can drive some of the smaller and more heavily indebted oil producers (such as American and Canadian producers) out of business. it's a long-term strategic move on the part of the gulf oil cartels to eliminate competition since long-term high oil prices are the primary basis for regional wealth whereas oil production is a drop in the bucket of GDP for western economies. also, the loosening of sanctions due to obama's recent deal with iran means iran will be flooding additional oil into the markets even as western producers find cheaper ways to extract oil from the ground (implying supply will keep increasing as long as possible, paradoxically, to compensate for dropping prices). there is also a point about bearish pessimism about global economic growth stemming from china's recent stock market collapse (that intelligent people all saw coming but most financial analysts did not). fears of economic downsizing are causing reductions on speculative investing in oil products further driving down prices.

when the middle eastern monarchies (namely saudi arabia) oil revenues are responsible for a good amount of the public's tolerance for dictatorial policies and corrupt politicians. when this revenue drops the people are less satisfied with their readership and are likely to rebel. history shows us that most world leaders will repress their people and force them to suffer rather than willingly give up power for the people's benefit.

the opec ..oil producing companies want to drive down oil prices by overproducing ..a market glut to stop America going into full scale fracking ...America has an enormous amount of oil ..but its expensive to produce ...by lowering oil prices they are making oil producers in the states think twice about fracking ...hopefully we can improve electric cars so we don't need or rely upon them

I heard this was a way to keep Rusasian revenues down and discourage more agression in the Ukraine.

Supply is exceeding demand. It is called capitalism.