In an interview with Bloomberg, the President of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC and the Energy Minister of Algeria, Abdelmajid Attar, said that despite the significant improvements in oil prices recently, the Organisation would not rush to ease oil output cuts.

He said, “Despite the positive signs and a significant improvement in oil prices, I think we should be very cautious.”

In the OPEC meeting held earlier this month, the OPEC+ was able to avoid a no-deal outcome amid disagreements over how the OPEC countries and its Russia-led allies are to go about production with the coronavirus pandemic still depressing fuel demand in the world.

The Ministers have been holding monthly meeting to decide the oil production policy for the following month. The current collective production cut for December 2020 is 7.7 million bpd and that of January 2021 will be 7.2 million bpd. At the end of its last meeting for 2020, the ministers agreed to increase production by no more than 500,000 bpd each month until April 2021.

Although the next meeting of the Joint Technical Committee (JTC) and the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) was originally scheduled for this week, it has been moved to early January, ahead of the next ministerial meeting on January 4^th 2021. OPEC made the announcement in statement on Monday, without giving any details about the postponement.

Excerpts from his submission:

“The crisis we have experienced this year has, in my opinion, strengthened cooperation. I believe that we have built a sustainable and long-term framework for cooperation.”

“We are very satisfied with the overall contribution of the non-OPEC countries, especially Russia. Its compliance rate has varied between 95% and 98% since May 2020. This is a highly satisfactory figure.”

“The new financial support for the economies that are being put in place, and the prospects for a rapid and broad deployment of vaccines, bode well [for the oil market].”