Opec oil ministers will meet on January 30 as scheduled despite a request from Iraq to move the date of the meeting to avoid a clash with the Iraqi elections, an Opec spokesman said on Wednesday. "The meeting will go ahead as scheduled. All the ministers have been consulted and a decision has been reached," the official said.
Ministers from the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries are expected to consider production cuts at the January 30 meeting to prevent stocks building too fast and pulling down prices.
Opec last month agreed to cut back 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of excess supply over formal quota limits from January 1 in an effort to stem a slide in world oil prices.
Crude has fallen nearly $10, or 17 percent, from record highs hit in late October but prices have rallied in recent days, partly on the expectation of an Opec cut. US crude was 34 cents up on Wednesday at $46.02 a barrel.
Global supply outages have helped revive prices, with more than 500,000 bpd of output in the US Gulf of Mexico and Norway's North Sea offline.