OPEC Has Consensus on No Change in Output, Badri Says

By Ayesha Daya and Matthew Campbell

Dec. 21 (Bloomberg) -- The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has a consensus on “no change” in oil production quotas for the bloc’s meeting tomorrow, its secretary-general said.

Abdalla Salem el-Badri doesn’t envisage any need for the producer group to raise the output ceiling from its current limit of 24.845 million barrels a day, he told reporters in Luanda, Angola, today. The group also doesn’t need to meet again before its next scheduled March 17 conference if market conditions stay the same, he said.

“There is a consensus that there is no change,” el-Badri said. “The price is very comfortable.”

OPEC’s 12 members, who supply about 40 percent of the world’s oil, are meeting in Luanda tomorrow amid expectations that crude demand could recover in 2010 as a two-year global economic slump ends.

El-Badri said he is “not happy” with members’ compliance with oil production targets, adding that overall compliance is about 60 percent. OPEC sets output levels for 11 of its members in an effort to guide prices. Iraq is exempt from quotas.

Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi of Saudi Arabia, the bloc’s biggest oil producer, said earlier this month that oil prices near $75 a barrel are “close to the target.” On Dec. 14, Qatari oil minister Abdullah bin Hamed al-Attiyah said “a price between $70 and $80 is suitable.”

Rally in 2009

Crude oil for January delivery traded 2 cents higher at $73.38 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile exchange at 10:36 a.m. London time today. Oil futures have rallied 65 percent this year.

All 36 analysts in a survey by Bloomberg last week said they expected OPEC to maintain its formal production limit at the Angola meeting. International Energy Agency statistics show inventories in North America and Europe are still “well above” their five-year average.

OPEC should work to bring inventory levels down to a “reasonable level” of 52 days’ worth of supply, compared with about 59 days currently, el-Badri said today.

Separately, the OPEC President and Angolan oil minister Jose Maria Botelho de Vasconcelos told Angola’s Radio Nacionale that “everything indicates that we will maintain the present situation” after the group’s meeting.

The two most accurate crude forecasters of 2009 both predict a further rally through next year to about $88 a barrel in the final quarter of 2010. Out of 21 quarterly forecasts compiled by Bloomberg at the start of this year, those of Societe Generale SA’s Mike Wittner and Hannes Loacker at Raiffeisen Zentralbank Oesterreich AG, have proved to be the most accurate, according to Bloomberg calculations.

OPEC’s members are Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.

To contact the reporters on this story: Ayesha Daya in Luanda via adaya1@bloomberg.net; Matthew Campbell in London at mcampbell39@bloomberg.net.