OPEC ministers were unable to reach a decision on production quotas at their meeting in Vienna today, the group’s Secretary General Abdalla el-Badri said. Oil prices rose in New York after ministers said there was no consensus on the group’s production limits, which have remained unchanged since the beginning of 2009. “We are going to assess the market situation over the next three months,” Mohammad Aliabadi, Iranian acting oil minister and current OPEC President, said after the meeting. OPEC is responsible for 40 percent of global supply. The producer group announced its biggest-ever output cuts in December 2008 amid a collapse in global demand, capping production at 24.845 million barrels a day for all members except Iraq, which is exempt from the quota system. The limit has remained unchanged since then. Crude oil for July delivery gained as much as 2.1 percent to $101.20 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange as of 9:37 a.m. local time. Twenty-seven of 30 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News on May 24-31 predicted that OPEC would keep its quota unchanged. “Reaching the consensus would have been quite challenging,” said Andrey Kryuchenkov, an analyst at VTB Capital in London who correctly forecast the group wouldn’t change its targets. “This is crude bullish as there is certainly no consensus within the group and OPEC is not ready to act united. The market remains undersupplied.” The 11 nations with production quotas pumped 26.15 million barrels a day in April, according to the IEA. That leaves the group with about 4.5 million barrels a day of spare capacity, most of it in Saudi Arabia, to be tapped in an emergency. OPEC’s 12 members are Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela. Iraq is outside the quota system. To contact the reporter on this story: Ayesha Daya in Dubai at adaya1@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rachel Graham at rgraham13@bloomberg.net

Source