OPEC has decided to hold an extraordinary full ministerial meeting on April 17 in Vienna to discuss the state of the oil market and the production cut deal, while the cartel's non-OPEC partners will join for a full OPEC+ meeting on the following day, April 18, an OPEC official told S&P Global Platts on Thursday.
OPEC could still hold its regular full ministerial meeting in June, as it usually does, the official with the organization told Platts.
A month before the full ministerial meeting in the middle of April, representatives of both OPEC and non-OPEC producers part of the deal will discuss the oil market developments at the monitoring committee meeting.
The date is yet to be finalized, but according to Platts's source at OPEC, the monitoring committee will likely meet on March 17-18 in Baku, Azerbaijan, which is part of the non-OPEC group of allies participating in the production cut deal. The energy ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Venezuela, and Algeria from OPEC and Russia and Oman from non-OPEC are part of the monitoring committee, while Azerbaijan will also take part as the host.
Announcing the new OPEC+ production deal, the cartel said in early December that the next OPEC/non-OPEC ministerial meeting would be held in April in Vienna, but no details about the date were revealed.
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It would make sense for OPEC and allies to hold a full meeting in mid-April, considering that they could decide whether or not to extend the production cuts which currently expire in June. The other reason for a mid-April meeting would be that the U.S. waivers for eight Iranian oil customers expire in early May, and the U.S. Administration has not yet given a clear signal whether it would be extending some waivers or push for zero Iranian oil exports.
Meanwhile, in its latest Monthly Oil Market Report published today, OPEC's secondary sources-the ones the cartel uses to calculate compliance levels-showed that OPEC's production declined by 751,000 bpd in December from November. The cartel's total crude oil production dropped to 31.578 million bpd last month, from 32.328 million bpd in November.
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
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