OPEC and allies likely to extend production cuts at meeting
VIENNA — With crude prices at two-year highs, OPEC and allied oil producing-nations appear ready to agree to extend their output cuts at a meeting Thursday after Iraq’s energy minister said there was broad agreement for such a move.
Benchmark crude prices are now close to $60 a barrel, depending on the grades, up almost 20 per cent since a year ago. And the bets have been that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and their non-OPEC partners will try to keep supply tight by prolonging the daily 1.8 million barrel output reductions agreed to a year ago.
For experts foreseeing such a scenario, the only question is for how long. Some market watchers are predicting that production quotas first agreed on in November 2016 will now be stretched into all of 2018, and the comments by Iraq’s Jabbar Ali Hussein Al-Luiebi strengthened such expectations.
“We uphold … extending the oil production cut for nine months,” Luiebi told reporters Wednesday, adding there was broad agreement among all OPEC ministers for the move. “That means it will finish by … (the) end of 2018.”