Former OPEC Governor Calls on Iran to Continue Consultations to Control Falling Crude Prices
(FNA)- Iran’s Former OPEC Governor Mohammad Ali Khatibi urged energy officials of the country to continue their consultations with other OPEC members to help control the crude markets, warnin that prices may continue their free fall afte winter.
"I believe that efforts to control OPEC output should continue and consultations should resume," Khatibi told FNA on Saturday.
He reiterated that a 7-dollar reduction of oil in one day shows the negative reaction of the international oil market to OPEC's meeting on Thursday, and said, "The (oil) market's negative reaction shows that the work has just begun and the efforts to stop decline in oil prices should continue …"
Khatibi said that if the OPEC members do not take any measure in this regard, the prices will further continue to drop after winter.
The 166th meeting of OPEC was held in Vienna on November 27.
Energy experts had warned that lack of consensus among the OPEC member-states to reduce the OPEC production ceiling would result in sharp decline of crude prices in 2015.
Saudi Arabia is blamed by most OPEC members for declining prices in the market due to its over-production way beyond the OPEC ceiling specified for the Arab state.
The energy experts also say that there is currently an extra one million barrels of oil and if the current trend will continue for 2015 there will be an extra two million barrels that will result in reduction of oil prices in the international markets.
Last week, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh underlined that the OPEC members were determined to reverse the trend of the falling market prices.
"It is important that the OPEC members are feeling the necessity for strengthening cooperation to restructure the current situation in the market and it is OPEC's responsibility to adopt proper action in this regard," Zanganeh said after meeting Venezuelan Foreign Minister Rafael Ramirez in Tehran.
"It is important that all OPEC members narrow down the gaps in their ideas during their bilateral and multilateral consultations."
Also in September, Zanganeh called on the OPEC members to make joint efforts to keep oil prices from falling further.
“Given the (ongoing) downward trend of the oil prices, the OPEC members should make efforts to offset their production to keep the prices from further instability,” he said.
OPEC is an international organization and economic cartel whose mission is to coordinate the policies of the oil-producing countries. The goal is to secure a steady income to the member states and to collude in influencing world oil prices through economic means.
OPEC is an intergovernmental organization that was created at the Baghdad Conference on 10–14 September 1960, by Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Later it was joined by nine more governments: Libya, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Indonesia, Algeria, Nigeria, Ecuador, Angola, and Gabon. OPEC was headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland before moving to Vienna, Austria, on September 1, 1965.