With less than two weeks before OPEC’s production cuts are set to expire, the producer group and its allies appear no closer to choosing when their next meeting will be. A rollover of the 1.2 million b/d production cut deal is widely expected — if OPEC, Russia and nine other partners can agree on a date to decide. Iran, which had been the lone remaining holdout on moving the meeting from next week, when it was originally scheduled, to July 3-4, surprised many OPEC officials Monday in offering a new proposal: July 10-12.
“I have no problem with July 10-12 if they insist, but I can’t do it [from] July 3-7. I have other appointments, plans and obligations,” Zanganeh told reporters after talking with Russian energy minister Alexander Novak in Tehran. “I told them I can do later than that, not July 3-4.” Any date change for the OPEC meeting would require unanimous approval by its 14 members. Several OPEC delegates said news reports of Zanganeh’s suggested date were the first they had heard of the proposal.
Novak, who had lobbied for the July 3-4 date to avoid a conflict with the G20 Summit June 28-29 in Tokyo, did not speak to reporters after leaving Tehran for Isfahan, where he will participate in a Russia-Iran bilateral meeting hosted by Iran’s power ministry on Tuesday. Zanganeh said that unless there is a unanimous agreement, the original OPEC meeting date of June 25-26 should be maintained.
“If they want and insist to change the date, I can in two weeks afterwards,” he said. Earlier Monday, Saudi energy minister Khalid al-Falih said that one country, which he did not name, was holding up the date change to July 3-4.
“We hope that they will come along and we will have a date confirmed in the next couple of days,” Falih told reporters after the Saudi-Japan Vision 2030 Business Forum in Tokyo. “But I am personally committed to making sure that we do meet and that we have a consensus, which has already been informally developing.”