Iran, south Arabia trying to bring OPEC, non-OPEC producers into harmony

Tehran's former Governor to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Fereidoun Berkeshli said Iran and Saudi Arabia are making hard efforts in contacts with OPEC and non-OPEC producers to persuade them to cooperate in controlling the oil market.
"Now, the two powerhouses, that is Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, have shared their responsibilities; Iran has contacted the neighboring states and made crucial consultations with the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Venezuela," Berkeshli told FNA on Wednesday.
"They have acted well in the preliminary consultations, which will have an important role in the fate of the (next OPEC) meeting and received promises from the negotiating sides for their cooperation in the OPEC," he added.
Berkeshli, meantime, called on Saudi Arabia to return to the situation of a floating oil producer and accept that it has no special share and that balancing the market is its responsibility.
His remarks came as reports said today that Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh and his Saudi counterpart Ali Ibrahim al-Naimi are likely to have meeting in Vienna on Thursday before the upcoming 166th Annual Meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) tomorrow.
The report by a number of news media outlets said that the meeting between Zanganeh and Al-Naimi would have a deep influence on the decision of the OPEC member-states during their meeting tomorrow.
Meantime, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Mexico and Venezuela had a quadrilateral meeting on Tuesday night.
The 166th meeting of OPEC will be held in Vienna on November 27.
Energy experts have warned that lack of consensus among the OPEC member-states to reduce the OPEC production ceiling will result in sharp decline of crude prices in 2015.
Saudi Arabia is blamed by most OPEC members for declining prices in the market due to its over-production way beyond the OPEC ceiling specified for the Arab state.
The energy experts also say that there is currently an extra one million barrels of oil and if the current trend will continue for 2015 there will be an extra two million barrels that will result in reduction of oil prices in the international markets.
Last week, Zanganeh underlined that the OPEC members were determined to reverse the trend of the falling market prices.
"It is important that the OPEC members are feeling the necessity for strengthening cooperation to restructure the current situation in the market and it is OPEC's responsibility to adopt proper action in this regard," Zanganeh said after meeting Venezuelan Foreign Minister Rafael Ramirez in Tehran.
"It is important that all OPEC members narrow down the gaps in their ideas during their bilateral and multilateral consultations."
Also in September, Zanganeh called on the OPEC members to make joint efforts to keep oil prices from falling further.
“Given the (ongoing) downward trend of the oil prices, the OPEC members should make efforts to offset their production to keep the prices from further instability,” he said.
OPEC is an international organization and economic cartel whose mission is to coordinate the policies of the oil-producing countries. The goal is to secure a steady income to the member states and to collude in influencing world oil prices through economic means.
OPEC is an intergovernmental organization that was created at the Baghdad Conference on 10–14 September 1960, by Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Later it was joined by nine more governments: Libya, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Indonesia, Algeria, Nigeria, Ecuador, Angola, and Gabon. OPEC was headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland before moving to Vienna, Austria, on September 1, 1965.