OPEC: No production cuts

OPEC is committed to continuing production of about 31.5 million barrels a day, Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum Resources and OPEC President Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu said in Vienna after the group met Friday. Members set aside their previous daily output target of 30 million barrels, a ceiling breached for 18 months.

OPEC’s Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri of Libya attend a news conference after a meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, at their headquarters in Vienna, Austria, Friday, Dec. 4, 2015.

Brent crude oil futures fell 60 cents to $43.24 a barrel by 10:54 am EDT (15:54 GMT), after rising in early trade.

WTI crude oil prices plummeted below $40 per barrel on Friday as OPEC has agreed to stick to its policy of flooding the global market with oil in an attempt to maintain and re-gain market share.

However, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies within OPEC have been more interested in protecting their market share from the challenge posed by United States shale oil.

Asali noted that out of global production of 80 million bpd of crude oil, 31 million bpd are produced by OPEC members, which means the OPEC output accounts for more than one-third of the commodity in the world.

Members met today in order to resolve issues with production limits in order to keep certain oil-producing countries afloat, as the number is a bit high for some of them to keep up.

“Saudi Arabia is adamant that any output cuts by the group needs to be accompanied by non-OPEC producers such as Russian Federation”.

“This decision reflects the consensus going into the meeting of OPEC’s policy for prices needing to find a floor to deter new non-OPEC supply projects”, Gareth Lewis-Davies, London-based energy strategist at BNP Paribas SA, said by phone.

Opec’s poorer nations – notably Venezuela, Ecuador and Algeria-had led the calls for a cut to help boost prices and in turn their badly-hit revenues.

In the run-up to the meeting, there was speculation the cartel would at least debate a production cut, though officials and analysts had largely played down talk of a move. That strategy clearly hasn’t worked, with benchmark US crude’s value falling by more than 40 percent over the past year and now hovering around the $41 mark per barrel.

The prices of crude oil have been on a constant decline since June 2014 and even halved during recent times.

“The OPEC member countries have lost so much money”, Zanganeh said Thursday in the Austrian capital.

Indonesia, which produced an estimated 789,000 barrels a day a year ago and has 3.7 billion barrels in reserve, originally joined OPEC in 1962 and left the group in 2009.