Oil ministers of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) said Wednesday that they were in agreement about keeping their current production limit, at the start of their spring meeting in Vienna, DPA reported.
At the current output ceiling of 24.85 million barrels per day (bpd), OPEC's basket price had remained stable between 70 and 80 dollars per barrel for the last 5 months, said Ecuador's Oil Minister Germanico Alfredo Pinto Troya, the chair of the conference. (One barrel equals 159 litres).
"In general, there is a consensus" on not changing the limit, Algerian Energy Minister Chakib Khelil told reporters.
Ministers acknowledged that they were currently producing around 2 million bpd over the limit, and that oil stocks would keep rising.
"But we expect in the third and fourth quarter that demand will increase," Khelil said.
OPEC's 12 member states signalled they would issue a call for adhering more closely to the output ceiling. Iraq is the cartel's only member that is not bound by the quota system.
The group has not changed its output limit since December 2008, when it decided to throttle production by 4.2 million bpd to support prices amid the global economic and financial crisis.