The EIA has, however, trimmed by $1 billion to $575 billion its forecast of the oil cartel's revenues this year.

The agency, which is the statistics arm of the Department of Energy, used price and production projections from its December Short-Term Energy Outlook, released earlier this week, to calculate the OPEC earnings forecasts.

The agency estimates OPEC's 2008 net export revenues at about $965 billion, $45 billion below the $1.01 trillion OPEC itself said it earned last year.

In July last year, the EIA forecast that OPEC could earn $1.25 trillion in 2008 and as much as $1.322 trillion in 2009. At that time, the EIA was expecting the price of US West Texas Intermediate crude to average $127/barrel in 2008 and $133/b in 2009.

After hitting records of more than $147/b in July 2008, however, prices cascaded downward over the subsequent months as the global economic downturn deepened and forecasters slashed their expectations of world oil demand.

Prices have been on a broadly upward trend since mid-February this year.

The EIA's latest monthly outlook, released on December 8, sees the price of West Texas Intermediate crude averaging $61.87/barrel in 2009, down slightly from the $62/b forecast in November.

WTI is expected to average $78.67/b in 2010, slightly higher than the $78.13/b the EIA forecast in November.

WTI futures traded at $71.10/b at 11:28 GMT Thursday.

--Margaret McQuaile, margaret_mcquaile@platts.com