By Xinhua,
Tehran : Iran Saturday proposed the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to again consider an output cut of one to 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) to help maintain a balance between oil supply and demand, the state television IRIB reported.
“It is better for a decision to be made for another cut of one million to 1.5 million barrels per day,” Iran’s OPEC representative Mohammad Ali Khatibi was quoted as saying.
“So that a balance between supply and demand is reached,” he added.
Khatibi made the proposal for a forthcoming OPEC meeting to be held in Cairo later this month. The meeting is seen as a preparation for a special OPEC ministerial meeting slated for Dec 17 in the western Algerian town of Oran to discuss prospects of international oil markets in the first half of 2009.
At the emergency meeting in Vienna last month, OPEC ministers had agreed to reduce output by 1.5 million bpd to 27.3 million bpd from the beginning of this month in an attempt to prevent prices from falling further.
The 13-member cartel said Thursday it would announce further cuts in oil output at the end of this month if global oil prices continued falling.
Oil prices fell to below $65 a barrel in New York last week as the prospect of a shrinking global economic growth and weakening energy demand weighed on the market.
The OPEC weekly price, which has continued to drop after reaching record highs in July this year, also slid to $56.83 per barrel last week. On Friday, the light, sweet crude for December delivery fell $1.20 to settle at $57.04 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Iran, which holds estimated recoverable oil reserves of 138 billion barrels, produces oil of some 4.2 million bpd.