OPEC president says cartel must be cautious on output Mar 8

Paris (Platts)--28Feb2006

OPEC's Nigerian president Nigeria said Tuesday it was too early to say
whether the oil cartel should change crude output targets when ministers meet
March 8 in Vienna.
     "I really don't want to pre-empt the debate. As president, I wouldn't
want to say anything that compromises the debate. All I would say is that
before the events in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, the market was looking a little
softer than I had anticipated," Edmund Daukoru, who is also Nigeria's oil
minister, told Platts.
     Daukoru was referring to the impact on crude oil prices of production
shut-ins in Nigeria as a result of attacks on facilities by Niger Delta
militants and to last Friday's attempted suicide attack on a key oil facility
in Saudi Arabia, the world's major oil supplier.
     "Events such as these, the weather, can always trigger another rise so we
have to wait a little bit," he said.
     Algeria's oil minister Chakib Khelil Sunday said his delegation would
argue for maintaining OPEC's current 28-mil b/d ceiling because a production
cut would not serve the cartel's interests at this time. Cutting output at
this time would cause prices to "heat up even more," Khelil said.
     OPEC meets next week to decide whether to keep pumping at full throttle
or to cut supply in line with projections of lower demand in the second
quarter. At their last meeting on Jan 31, ministers said prices were too high
even to consider cutting production. US light crude futures traded as high as
$69.20/bbl in the days preceding OPEC's January meeting, just $1.65/bbl short
of the $70.85/bbl all-time high reached in late August as Hurricane Katrina
struck the US.
     Kuwait's oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Fahed al-Sabah said last week he would
support a cut in supply only if weaker demand pulled prices lower.
 --Jacinta Moran, jacinta_moran@platts.com

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