Baku, Azerbaijan, June 6
By Aygun Badalova - Trend:
OPEC is close to its upper limit in terms of output, with only limited gains expected from Iran and Iraq this year, analysts of the US JP Morgan bank said in their weekly Oil Market report, obtained by Trend.
OPEC spare capacity remains largely concentrated in heavy crude offshore Saudi Arabia and its direct neighbours, analysts stressed.
They also said that the lack of an agreement at the latest OPEC meeting has the hallmarks of the difference of opinion between Iran and Saudi Arabia that was evident in Doha in April and may be still simmering.
Iran's output is currently assessed at 3.8 million barrels per day in June.
Analysts mentioned that ahead of the meeting, Iran's oil minister stressed the need for country-level quotas, without which a collective target or ceiling would effectively be meaningless.
While there was hope that this would enable an agreement to be reached, Iran's apparent desire to see the appropriate cap for Iranian output would be 14.5 percent of OPEC production - excluding Iraq (and presumably Indonesian volumes), may have proved too divisive for the Conference to accept. We estimate that this would be above 4.0 mbd and would require other producers to have shouldered cuts," analysts said.
Thus the structural flaw at the heart of OPEC's current structure remains unresolved, they added.
Earlier Iran said the country targets producing 4.8 million barrels per day of crude oil in the next five years.
On June 2 OPEC failed to agree on output policy and set a new ceiling.
The next OPEC meeting will be held Nov. 30 in Vienna.
Total OPEC oil production in April averaged 32.44 million barrels per day, an increase of 188,000 barrels per day over the previous month, according to OPEC latest Oil Market Report.
Saudi Arabia's oil production in April averaged 10.125 million barrels per day compared 10.133 million barrels per day in March.