Iran Calls on OPEC Members to Stay within Quota
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh sent a letter to the head of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), urging member states to respect a shared production ceiling of 30 million barrels a day, an official said.
Mehdi Asali, Iran’s OPEC delegate, said the Iranian oil minister, in his Tuesday letter to OPEC Secretary-General Abdullah al-Badri, urged the organization to scale down its production by 1.3 million barrels a day.
"While (OPEC) production is supposed to be 30 million barrels a day, it has reached around 31.3 million barrels a day," Press TV quoted Iran's OPEC representative Mehdi Asali as saying on Wednesday.
“This is while it is clear which countries are producing above their quota…Crude production by certain countries has increased so much that it has surpassed the ceiling,” he added.
Because of overproduction chiefly by Saudi Arabia and non-OPEC producers, there is currently up to 2.5 million bpd of excess oil in the market which has caused crude prices to lose around 60% of their value since mid-2014.
OPEC introduced output ceiling of 30 million bpd in its December 2011 meeting as it scrapped allocating fixed production quotas to member countries. The group, however, has been producing nearly a million more barrels than its ceiling for the past 16 months.
