OPEC will maintain crude oil production targets

OPEC will leave oil production targets unchanged when it meets next week in Vienna after prices recovered, the group’s president said.

“We have been seeing slowly a much reduced variation of oil prices,” Jose Maria Botelho de Vasconcelos, who is also Angola’s oil minister, said in an interview in Luanda, Angola, today. “This is a sign that the world economy is recovering. Everything shows that they will keep output unchanged.”

Botelho de Vasconcelos’s views chimed with an official from a Persian Gulf member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries who said today the group would probably hold quotas steady to avoid derailing the global economic recovery. The official declined to be identified by name because a final decision hasn’t been made.

OPEC is holding its third meeting of the year on Sept. 9 in Vienna. The group hasn’t altered output targets since it agreed last year to reduce total production for its 11 members with quotas, excluding Iraq, by 4.2 million barrels a day to arrest plunging prices as the world fell into recession.