Members of an OPEC advisory group generally agreed Monday night that OPEC needs to stick to its formal production quotas, Iran's OPEC governor Mohammad Ali Khatibi said Tuesday.
The Ministerial Monitoring Committee advisory group stopped short of making recommendations to OPEC about the organization's output policy, however, Iran's oil minister Gholam Hossein Nozari said Monday.
"There was an agreement at the MMC meeting that there is a need to adhere to quotas, and we will have long discussions tonight regarding this," Khatibi said Tuesday morning, ahead of a meeting of the full Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Minus Iraq, which doesn't follow OPEC's formal production allocation system, the OPEC-12 in August produced about 596,000 barrels a day above the group's formal target of 29.673 million barrels a day.
Saudi Arabia's oil minister Ali Naimi Tuesday called the global oil market balanced and said the kingdom's production increases have been successful in taming scorching oil prices, suggesting the world's largest oil exporter isn't seeking a cut in current OPEC production levels.
Speaking to reporters as he arrived in Vienna for an OPEC meeting later Tuesday, Naimi said: "We have worked very hard since June, to bring prices to where they are now. We have been very successful."
Saudi Arabia announced a unilateral additional 250,000-barrels-a-day output increase at a hastily-convened summit of oil consumer and producer nations in June in Riyadh. The decision may have helped drive oil prices down from all-time highs above $147 a barrel hit in July.
But Saudi Arabia, OPEC's de facto leader, has raised prices to a seven-month high for customers buying its heavy oil, which is more difficult to refine, traders said last week.
Analysts who track oil tanker deliveries and movements have noticed a recent drop in Middle East crude shipments and pin that on the kingdom, since it's been the only producer to ramp up production in recent months.
"The Saudis are already responding to what the market needs, and I think they dropped their output from 9.7 million to about 9.4 million (barrels of oil per day) in August because of slower demand - so I believe that returning to quotas would be best in light of forecasted decreasing demand," Khatibi said.
OPEC, gathering for its third meeting of the year on Tuesday, is widely expected to hold output steady as it surveys oil prices that have fallen sharply over the past few months.