Opec's June 1 meeting is likely to keep oil output unchanged though supply and demand figures suggest it should cut by up to 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd), Iran's Opec governor said on Friday.
"As the market is expecting us to continue to make additional barrels available just to calm the market, my expectation is a repeat of the decision of the last meeting to maintain the current level of production," Hossein Kazempour Ardebili told reporters.
Claude Mandil, head of the International Energy Agency that advises 26 industrialised countries, said he "could not imagine" Opec cutting production with prices close to $70 a barrel and within sight of their record high.
The two men were speaking at an Opec-IEA workshop in Oslo.
The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meets in Caracas on June 1 to chart output policy. It has been pumping close to capacity for a year but has failed to subdue prices that have been driven higher by real and feared supply disruptions and an influx of fund money.
The group's official ceiling has been 28 million bpd since July, 2005. "The meeting is unlikely to make any change," Kazempour said. "But if we were to go by the fundamentals, we should cut a few hundred thousand barrels a day and up to 1.2 million."
In Tehran, Iranian Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri-Hamaneh echoed that view. He poured water on suggestions by some analysts that oil could reach $100.
"I believe that oil prices will not become three digits in the future," the minister told the students' news agency ISNA.
Opec's acting secretary-general Mohammed Barkindo declined to give any indication of what the oil producers' group would decide at the meeting in Venezuela.
"June is a century away," he told reporters at the workshop in Oslo. "It is really premature to say...because we are still looking at the numbers."
"At the end of the day, the final numbers running up to Caracas will determine what decisions will be taken by the conference. We are still working on those numbers."
Mandil said he favoured the lowest possible oil price compatible with investment in new production, but he did not give a number.
"Certainly much lower than now," he said. "There is no need to increase supply. There is a strong need to increase capacity," said Mandil.
Mandil said that it would be preferable if global spare production capacity returned to levels seen several years ago of around 4 million barrels per day from levels of around 2 million that have prevailed in the past few years.
But Opec's Barkindo said that producer countries needed assurance that demand would hold up.
"If Opec is being asked to raise spare capacity to the level of several years ago - a level of spare capacity that provided a cushion, an insurance against emergencies like the hurricanes last year - Opec needs to have some guarantees on the security of the demand for oil," Barkindo said. "It would be too much of a risk for Opec to invest the huge resources that are required to build this capacity when Opec is not sure of the demand for oil," he said.