August 7, 2008 - Libya's top oil official said August 6 that OPEC would keep crude production levels unchanged for the time being, stressing that supplies were secure despite outages in Nigeria.
"There is enough oil in the market," Shokri Ghanem, head of Libya's National Oil Corporation, told Platts by telephone from Tripoli.
OPEC will continue monitoring oil market developments and will act in a timely manner should there be indications of a shortage of crude on world markets, Ghanem said.
"There is enough time between here and September to allow us [to] monitor the market and the price," he said, referring to OPEC's next scheduled meeting on September 9 in Vienna.
In the week ended August 8, Qatari oil minister Abdullah al-Attiyah said OPEC would not let falling oil prices get out of control and was ready to act should supply overtake demand.
"We will be ready to intervene in this regard. I believe that OPEC will not allow the market situation to deteriorate in such a dramatic or quick manner and if there is an increase in supply and a decrease in demand, I am sure OPEC will definitely intervene to correct this situation," Attiyah said August 1 in an interview with Al-Jazeera television, as monitored by the BBC.
"We will focus more on the supply and demand issue and will interfere when supply exceeds demand," Attiyah said.
Iranian oil minister Gholamhossein Nozari said a day later that OPEC would discuss crude output control at its September meeting if oil prices remained on a downward trend.
"If the oil price continues its downward trend, one of the topics in the next OPEC meeting will definitely be the issue of respecting quotas so that countries that have increased their [production] capacity are controlled," Nozari said, quoted by oil ministry news service Shana.
Saudi Arabia is the only OPEC country with any significant volume of spare capacity.
In May, oil minister Ali Naimi said the country would boost output by 300,000 b/d to 9.45 million b/d in June in response to customer demand.
A further boost was to take production to 9.7 million b/d in July.
Under OPEC's largely notional 29.673 million b/d output target, Saudi Arabia's allocation is 8.943 million b/d, 757,000 b/d below the planned July level.
"OPEC, as the responsible body for controlling the market, should be more careful to control the quotas and I think OPEC will pay special attention to this [in the next meeting]," official news agency IRNA quoted Nozari as saying when asked about the possibility of OPEC agreeing to a cut on production.
"The issue is not about returning to [strict] quotas. The issue is that some countries which have oversupply should control their production," he said.
Ghanem, meanwhile, also said pipeline maintenance work and ongoing repairs at Total's al-Jurf field would continue for some weeks.
"The maintenance is still going on and it will take some more weeks," he said.
Maintenance work on a pipeline that links the Waha and Defa oil fields and continuing work at the al-Jurf field after a drilling accident in May have lowered Libya's oil production by as much 145,000 b/d from levels of 1.74-1.75 million b/d earlier this year.
A spokesman for Total, which has a 37.5% interest in al-Jurf, said a final date as to when repairs will be completed had yet to be finalized but it would not be this month.
He said a production pipe was damaged during drilling of a B18 gas injection well.
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