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)