New York – Oil prices fell Tuesday as OPEC oil ministers, gathering in Vienna this week, indicated they would keep output levels intact.
Light, sweet crude for April delivery fell 83 cents to settle at $61.58 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, extending its drop from Monday, when the contract fell $1.26.
Already, oil exports out of Nigeria, the world’s 11th-largest oil producer, have been reduced by 455,000 barrels a day, or about 20 percent. Edmund Daukoru, OPEC’s president and Nigeria’s oil minister, said Tuesday the African nation was “committed to providing adequate security for operators in the (Niger) Delta,” and that it planned to pump an additional 600,000 barrels a day by June.
OPEC’s official output is 28 million barrels per day, though that does not include Iraq’s 1.5 million barrels per day.
