OPEC ministers should consider the needs of the global oil market in a year's time, rather than just the current demand/supply balance, when they meet to review the cartel's production ceiling in two weeks, the head of the International Energy Agency Maria van der Hoeven said Tuesday.
"It's up to them," van der Hoeven said when asked if OPEC should consider reducing its current production levels given signs of apparent oversupply in oil markets.
"It's important to look not only at the very short term but keep an eye one what happens, for instance, in a year's time and that means that you can't now decide on something [happening] many months ahead," she said in an interview on the sidelines of an oil conference in London.
OPEC crude output rose to 30.7 million b/d in April, some 700,000 b/d above its current output ceiling of 30 million b/d, the IEA said earlier Tuesday in its latest monthly oil market report.
As a result, the cartel is also currently producing 1.8 million b/d more than the IEA's estimated 28.9 million b/d "call" on OPEC's oil for the second quarter of 2013.
Van der Hoeven noted that, last year, the global oil market was able to "cope" with outages affecting the world's supplies of oil including sanctions on Iranian oil and supply disruption to some North African producers due to security issues.
In its latest monthly oil market report, the IEA said it expects the demand for OPEC's oil to recover to 30 million b/d in the fourth quarter of 2013. For 2013 as a whole, the IEA cut its estimated call on OPEC oil to 29.6 million b/d, down 100,000 b/d from its previous estimate.
Also speaking in London, the head of the IEA's oil industry and markets division, Antoine Halff, said he believes the current oil market is comfortable but not necessarily over-supplied.
"I think the market, it's reasonably comfortable, it's not over-supplied there is no dramatic price pressure, the price is not collapsing," he said in an interview. "We've seen some tightness in stocks, global stocks are high but product inventories in OECD are not as high as crude. It's a mixed picture, it's a balanced picture but there is no dramatic overhang."
Industry-held oil stocks in OECD countries rose by 14.9 million barrels in March and built by a further 27.7 million barrels in April, the IEA said earlier.
