OPEC ministers will be seeking to cut oil production when they meet on Thursday, but deciding how output should be reduced and by whom could prove more difficult, analysts say.
With OPEC already overshooting its production quota by seven percent, according to March trading figures, there could be heated debate over whether members' individual ceilings need to be reduced or simply observed.
Among the factors clouding the cartel's deliberations will be the continuing uncertainty over when Iraqi oil exports are most likely to resume.
"The problem facing OPEC is that when they meet on Thursday they will still not know when Iraqi oil is likely to come back on stream," said ABN Amro analyst Jan Stuart.
"OPEC is missing that key piece of information, so I think the meeting is really a face-saving way of admitting that they don't yet know what to do."
US President George W. Bush called last Wednesday for the UN to lift the sanctions currently preventing Iraqi oil exports, as Turkey pressed for clearance to sell the 1.8 million tonnes of Iraqi oil currently filling storage facilities at its southern Ceyhan terminal.
But Russia, a veto-wielding permanent member of the UN Security Council, appeared to link the lifting of sanctions to a return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq.
"OPEC politics have suddenly become more complicated because for 12 years, they have known what to expect of Iraq," said Mehdi Varzi, an analyst with investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.
"Now we're about to enter a new and different era in which at some stage OPEC must discuss Iraq re-entering into the quota system. It's too soon to discuss that yet but I think OPEC realizes that Iraq will try to raise production capacity as far as it can, when the time is right."
Meanwhile, the ministers will be considering three main options on Thursday, an OPEC source told AFP: to stick rigorously to the existing quotas, to reduce quotas as well as improving compliance or to do nothing and review the situation at their next scheduled meeting in June.
With the basket of seven crudes used by OPEC to chart prices now standing at around US$25 (23 euros) a barrel -- squarely in the middle of its US$22 to US$28 target range -- the passive option cannot be completely ruled out, the source said.
"The fact that this meeting has been called a `consultative meeting' actually means a lot," he said. "It means the ministers are not obligated to make a decision now. They may just consult and figure out what is the best course of action."
With seasonal demand falling, however, exacerbated by the global economic slump, most analysts consider some kind of production cut to be on the cards.
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