Amid speculation whether Iraq would really play along with the OPEC production cuts, the oil minister of the cartel’s no.2 producer said on Monday that the country had already cut 180,000 bpd off its production, and planned to reduce output by another 30,000 bpd by the end of January. Speaking at an industry event in London, Iraq’s oil minister Jabar Ali al-Luaibi said that Iraq had cut production from a level of 4.75 million bpd, Reuters reports, but this was not the reference basket that OPEC used to determine who should cut what under the production cut agreement signed last November. Under the November 30 OPEC deal, Iraq had promised to cut 210,000 bpd from a reference production level of 4.561 million bpd —for a production target of 4.351 bpd. Before signing the agreement, OPEC’s second-biggest producer had pleaded exemption on the grounds that it needs revenues to fight […]