OPEC chief suggests no output change

OPEC members support keeping production at present levels, the president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said Dec. 2, looking ahead to the organization’s next ministerial meeting later in December.

The comments by Sheik Ahmed Fahd Al Ahmed Al Sabah, who is also Kuwait’s oil minister, indicated that the organization will not change its output when the ministers meet Dec. 12.

“I have support to keep output unchanged,” he said ahead of a meeting of European Union and OPEC ministers in the Austrian capital.

But he said the group had yet to decide if it would continue to offer an additional 2 million barrels a day spare capacity to the market, telling reporters that would be discussed at the Dec. 12 meeting in Kuwait.

OPEC offered an extra 2 million barrels above the organization’s 28 million barrel daily ceiling if demand was there at its September ministerial meeting in a move to calm volatile markets. With prices moving lower in recent weeks, that reassurance may now not be needed.

Refinery tightness strains market stability

The participants said in a joint EU-OPEC statement that they “recognized ... that the serious tightness in the global refinery system would continue to strain market stability in the next few years.”

“We will continue to urge consumer countries to invest in the downstream sector so as to relieve the pressure on product prices,” Al Sabah said in comments prepared for delivery at the closed meeting.

The Vienna meeting is focused on coordinating oil supply and demand and planning energy strategies for the coming years.

The second meeting of the OPEC-EU Energy Ministerial Dialogue follows a first round of talks in Brussels in June. That meeting was the first at this level between the two organizations.

The European Union is represented by EU Council and U.K. Minister of Energy Malcolm Wicks; Andris Piebalgs, the European Commissioner for Energy, and Austrian Economics Minister Martin Bartenstein, OPEC said.

OPEC representatives include Al Sabah, OPEC Secretary-General Adnan Shihab-Eldin and Nigerian Oil Minister Edmund Maduabebe Daukoru, tapped to take over as OPEC president on Jan. 1.

—The Associated Press