The movement came as a Reuters report suggested that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had decided against supporting falling crude oil prices, when representatives met in Vienna today.
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OPEC Secretary General Abdullah el-Badri said the group “decided to postpone this decision to the next OPEC meeting until the picture will be… clearer for us to decide on a number”. Most analysts expect OPEC to maintain its production ceiling of 30 million barrels a day, a target it routinely exceeds in reality but doesn’t change unless it is changing strategy.
“We are only 35 percent of the producers and there are still 65… percent producers out there”, said conference president Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu.
In a statement after the oil group’s meeting in Vienna on Friday, OPEC noted that oil and product stock levels in the OECD “have continued to rise”.
Houston’s Fuel Fix reports that “Indonesia, which produced an estimated 789,000 barrels a day past year and has 3.7 billion barrels in reserve, originally joined OPEC in 1962 and left the group in 2009”.
Iraq is also resurgent.
Saudi Arabian oil minister Ali al-Naimi said on Friday that growing global demand could absorb an expected jump in Iranian production next year.
Demand from emerging markets like China is down, and with production still so high there’s a global glut of oil.
Ahead of the semi-annual meeting, OPEC’s biggest producer, Saudi Arabia, defied calls to slash output, in hopes of protecting its share of the market.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries sent crude prices reeling a year ago when it made a decision to maintain output, continuing to pump into an oversupplied market as it sought to force higher-cost producers to scale back their operations. That seems unlikely and doesn’t even account for the US, where independent oil operators do what’s best for themselves.
It highlighted efforts by poorer oil-producing nations to protect their income from weak prices by raising production – making the over-supply issue worse.
Brent North Sea crude for January fell 60 cents to $43.24. Instead, it went all in for the one-year-old Saudi Arabia-led policy of pumping, pumping, pumping until rivals – external, such as Russian Federation and US shale drillers, as well as internal – are squeezed out of market share.
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Iranian oil minister Bijan Zangeneh has said Iran’s goal is to increase output by half a million barrels a day in early 2016, and eventually raise it by one million barrels, bringing Iran’s daily total to around 3.8 million barrels a day.
