VIENNA - OPEC chief Abdalla Salem El-Badri does not expect the oil cartel to cut production at a key meeting next month, Dow Jones Newswires reported Friday.
Despite signs of even weaker crude demand and swelling oil inventory in big energy consuming nations, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries first needed to fully implement an agreement announced in December to remove 4.2 million barrels a day from world markets, El-Badri said in an interview.
"We need to take all that off the market before we can talk about new cuts," El-Badri said.
Nevertheless, he did not want to pre-empt discussions at the meeting in OPEC's Vienna headquarters on May 28, he insisted.
The cartel's 12 ministers "can come together and not hesitate to take action," El-Badri said.
OPEC has reduced its oil production target by an overall 4.2 million barrels per day since September to 24.84 million bpd, the lowest since just after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In its April monthly bulletin, the cartel revised down its estimate for world crude demand this year and predicted that a "devasting contraction" in consumption would keep prices under pressure in the months ahead.
Earlier this week, Iran's Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari said Tehran would back a cut in OPEC's oil production at the May meeting if the crude market is oversupplied.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani said in Tehran that an oil price of at least 70 dollars a barrel of oil is "acceptable," the official IRNA news agency reported on Thursday.
"It benefits both oil consuming and producing nations to reach an agreement on a certain oil price level and I think that in order to encourage investment it should be 70 dollars or more," he was quoted as saying on the sidelines of an oil and gas exhibition.
"OPEC members meeting in May will review the world's oil supply and demand situation and will discuss a fair price which will encourage the investors to invest in this sector," Shahristani said.
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