CAIRO — OPEC held off on announcing new oil-output cuts Saturday, but its alarm over falling demand and a slumping economy potentially laid the groundwork for a big reduction in a matter of weeks.
Chakib Khelil, Algeria’s oil minister and the group’s president, said the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries ministers noted “with concern the continued deterioration of the global economic situation and its impact on oil demand.”
The ministers, he said in a statement, agreed to “take any additional action . . . to balance oil supply and demand, and achieve market stability” at their Dec. 17 meeting in Oran, Algeria.
The outcome of Saturday’s meeting in Cairo, convened about a month after the group decided to pull 1.5 million barrels a day of oil from the market, seemed unlikely to put a floor beneath crude prices that have fallen by about 60 percent from their mid-July highs of $147 a barrel.
Saudi Arabia, the 13-member organization’s top exporter and kingpin, broke with its usual silence about specific prices and cited $75 a barrel as a favorable target. King Abdullah, in an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper published Saturday, said that would be a “fair price.”
“Eventually, if we want the marginal producer to produce and help the world supply, then we need to give them a better price,” said Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi.
But it was unclear how the group, supplier of 40 percent of the world’s crude, could realize that target soon, given the lack of action at Saturday’s meeting. Some analysts questioned the wisdom of waiting in light of the current weak oil prices.
Ahead of the meeting, the U.S. benchmark light, sweet crude futures contract settled a penny lower Friday at $54.43 in an abbreviated session on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
