Iran Opposes OPEC Rescheduling Meeting To Early July

Three weeks before the OPEC meeting currently scheduled for June 25-26, it looks like the cartel is at odds even about whether this meeting should be held in that particular week, with Iran opposing delaying the summit to the following week.

Two weeks ago, reports started circulating that OPEC is delaying the meeting to the first week of July, Warren Patterson, Head of Commodities Strategy at ING, said, quoting Ecuador’s Resources Minister.

Now Iran, which is at odds with the Gulf Arab members of OPEC, has told the cartel that it wouldn’t agree to the group postponing the key meeting expected to discuss the fate of the production cut pact expiring at the end of June. Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh disagrees with a proposal from OPEC to delay the meeting to early July, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing a letter that Zanganeh has written to the cartel.

In another letter that Reuters has seen, OPEC says that OPEC member Algeria and non-OPEC producer Kazakhstan also oppose rescheduling the meeting.

Earlier this year, OPEC and its non-OPEC partners led by Russia scrapped one extraordinary meeting scheduled for April that was supposed to take stock of the situation of the oil market. A panel of the OPEC+ allies recommended that partners cancel the scheduled extraordinary meeting in mid-April, leaving the decision for the cuts extension for a meeting at the end of June instead.

Before scrapping that meeting, OPEC and Russian officials were signaling that mid-April would have been too early to assess the actual impact of the sanctions on Venezuela and the U.S. policy on the waivers for Iranian oil customers, after the waivers expire in early May.

Later in April, the U.S. removed all sanction waivers for Iranian oil buyers, tightening the screws on Iran’s oil exports and leaving OPEC guesstimating how much Iranian supply to the market would further fall amid other supply outages around the world and an uncertain outlook about oil demand.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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