Opec’s decision to cut output is proving ineffective against speculators, its president Chakib Khelil said on Saturday, adding its next gathering in December would hopefully take more ”practical” steps.
”The current situation of the oil market is caused by speculators’ practices,” Algeria’s official APS news agency quoted him as saying. ”Opec’s decision to reduce output has proved to be ineffective against those speculators.”
He added: ”We are not working against supply and demand, but against speculators.”
”The next Opec meeting planned for December 17, 2008 in Oran will come out with a decision that we hope will be more practical,” said Khelil, also Algeria’s energy and mines minister.
Opec ministers meeting in Vienna earlier this week agreed to reduce the producer group’s oil production by 520 000 barrels a day over the next 40 days.
Oil prices are down about 30% from a peak over $147 a barrel hit in mid-July, pulled lower by softening demand and a recent rebound in the US dollar.
Oil prices rose slightly on Friday as Hurricane Ike neared the Texas Coast, shuttering a quarter of US crude oil and refinery production.
But the gains were tempered by mounting concerns that high energy costs and an economic slowdown are cutting deeply into global fuel demand — worries that briefly had crude below the $100 mark for the first time since early April.
A report that Saudi Arabia had no plans to cut output, despite Opec’s agreement in Vienna this week to trim supply, undercut much of the bullish effect of the Opec’s announcement that it would reduce production. – Reuters