The Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries will only call an emergency meeting if there is a
shortage of supply in the oil markets, Qatar's oil minister Abdullah Al Attiyah
said Thursday.
"If there is a shortage of supply, OPEC will do what it can," Al
Attiyah told reporters in the Qatari capital, Doha.
He said high crude prices weren't driven by supply shortages and markets were
currently well supplied.
"We don't see there's any shortage of supply. Maybe it [the high oil
price] is related to seasonal [factors] because of the severe winter. If there
is no shortage of supply and [on-going] speculation [in the oil markets] OPEC
cannot interfere," Al Attiyah added.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in
February were unchanged at $90.30 a barrel at 0930 GMT.
Nymex crude had earlier touched an intraday high of $90.71 a barrel as positive
sentiment spilled into Asia from payroll giant Automatic Data Processing Inc.'s
report that U.S.
employers added 297,000 jobs in December, triple the increase economists were
expecting.
OPEC met in Quito, Ecuador, last month and chose to
leave the group's official production quotas unchanged.
OPEC's 12 members in December saw crude output increase by about 85,000 barrels
a day compared with November levels, due to increased production from Nigeria and Iraq, a survey by Dow Jones
Newswires showed this week. The survey estimated that output by all 12 group
members rose to 29.407 million barrels a day, versus 29.322 million barrels a
day in November.