OPEC assesses member compliance with quota
OPEC assesses member compliance with quota
JAKARTA (JP): The Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC) held preliminary talks yesterday to assess the
compliance of its members with production quotas amid heated
discussion over a proposed quota increase.
The Ministerial Monitoring Subcommittee (MMC) which is charged
with overseeing the compliance of member countries with their
respective production quotas, met yesterday afternoon at
Dharmawangsa Hotel in South Jakarta to compare each member's oil
production to its own output quota.
The committee was made up of the ministers of three member
countries -- Indonesia, Iran and Nigeria.
Other OPEC member countries are Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.
The OPEC governor for Indonesia, Purnomo Yusgiantoro, who was
also present at the MMC meeting, said the data on the oil output
of the 11 member countries would be compared with the data
released by the six official OPEC monitoring agencies.
"By comparing the data, we shall arrive at quota figures for
next year which would be recommended for OPEC," Purnomo said.
According to Antara, the six monitoring agencies are the
Energy Information Agency, the International Energy Agency, the
Center for Global Energy Studies, Platt's, the Cambridge Energy
Research Association and Petroleum International Weekly.
The six agencies said that OPEC currently produced 27.85
million billion barrels per day (bpd), compared to its maximum
quota of 25.033 million bpd.
Currently, Indonesia has a quota of 1.330 million bpd, Algeria
750,000 bpd, Iran 3.6 million bpd, Iraq 1.2 million bpd, Kuwait
two million bpd, Libya 1.39 bpd, Nigeria 1.865 bpd, Qatar 375,000
bpd, Saudi Arabia eight million bpd, the United Arab Emirates
1.161 million bpd, and Venezuela 2.359 million bpd.
The 103rd OPEC ministerial conference is to open today and
will last until Dec. 1 at Dharmawangsa Hotel.
The conference will also discuss administration and finance,
the restructuring of OPEC's organization, oil price development
and the oil production of member countries.
The conference will elect a new OPEC secretary general for the
next three-year term, a position which is currently held by
Rilwanu Lukman from Nigeria.
However, the conference is speculated to be preoccupied with
the issue of a proposed quota increase which was raised by Saudi
Arabia, the world's largest oil producer.
Saudi Arabia has called on OPEC to increase its oil production
quota to more than 27 million bpd to anticipate the world's
growing demand for oil.
The country said the world's crude oil demand would rise by
more than 2.3 million bpd to 75.8 million bpd next year.
Therefore, it argued that OPEC should take up at least 1.07
million bpd of the 2.3 million bpd additional demand.
Most member countries, however, are refusing to raise the
current quota to that level.
They said most of the increase in the world's oil demand
projected for 1998 would be met by non-OPEC countries which
currently accounted for 60 percent of the world market.
They feared an increase in OPEC's quota would weaken oil
prices.
"OPEC oil production will apparently increase next year but we
don't expect the increase to destabilize the market," Iran's Oil
Minister Bizhan Namdar Zangeneh was quoted by Antara as saying on
his arrival at Cengkareng Airport yesterday.
Oil prices currently stand at US$19 per barrel. (jsk)