Iranian Oil Minister Masoud Mirkazemi said Tuesday that unilateral moves by some OPEC members to raise output would have no impact on prices because there was no shortage of supply on markets.
"After the Libyan conflict, some OPEC members went beyond the unity policy [of the organization] and demanded to increase supply. But our analysis was that this increase will not impact prices," Mirkazemi, the current OPEC president, was quoted as saying by official news agency IRNA.
"There is no problem with supply. If we have proper analysis outside political pressures, we can find out realities and our advice is to avoid unilateral moves," he said.
Mirkazemi's remarks appeared to be addressed to OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia, which raised its output by around 1 million b/d in February to make up for the cut in supplies from fellow OPEC member Libya. The UAE and Kuwait have also raised production to help calm markets as oil prices rose to 32-month highs, partly on the back of the crisis in Libya, which led to the loss of 1.3 million b/d of high quality crude oil.
Iran, which has held the OPEC presidency since the start of the year, has insisted that there is no need for an emergency meeting because the price rise was not related to supply and demand fundamentals.
"OPEC's capability to control the market is limited. For example, geopolitics factors are out of OPEC's control," said Iran's OPEC governor, Mahmoud Ali Khatibi on the sidelines of celebrations in Tehran marking the organization's 50th anniversary.
"OPEC can only establish discipline between supply and demand and balance these two. Naturally, the organization cannot do much about paper transactions on the market, geopolitics factors and such. It doesn't have any measure to control them," Khatibi said in a televised interview.
