OPEC and friends will discuss later this week if the production cut deal should be extended by six or nine months, because there isn't a unanimous unconditional support for a nine-month extension, Kuwaiti Oil Minister Essam al-Marzouq said on Tuesday.
"We have agreed on the six months. Some of the countries have agreed to six months subject to a revision in November for an additional three months," al-Marzouq said before heading to Vienna for the Thursday meeting, as quoted by Reuters.
Kuwait is part of the OPEC committee monitoring the cuts together with fellow OPEC members Algeria and Venezuela, and non-OPEC Russia and Oman.
Asked about a six- or a nine-month extension, Kuwait's al-Marzouq said that "We are going to discuss it in the monitoring committee and we will come up with a recommendation to the ministerial conference."
The Kuwaiti minister, whose country supports the nine-month deal extension, went on to add:
"From what I have heard, some of the press releases, the Iraqi and Iranian ministers have declared that they prefer six months."
Iraq and Iran had given some form of support to the idea of extending the cuts, without committing to specific timeframes so far.
"For nine months not everybody [is] on board," according to the Kuwaiti minister.
Related: OPEC's No. 3: Deeper Cuts Are On The Table
However, following the meeting between Saudi Arabia's Oil Minister Khalid al-Falih and Iraqi Oil Minister Jabar Ali al-Luaibi on Monday, OPEC's no.1 and no.2 reportedly agreed the cuts need to be extended by nine months.
Iraq, which was a major holdout in the negotiations of the initial deal, has also been viewed as a potential stumbling block to a consensus on a nine-month extension of the cuts.
After the meeting with his Iraqi counterpart, al-Falih said that he did not expect any opposition in OPEC to a nine-month extension.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More