Oil prices fell Monday on renewed doubts that OPEC will engineer an output freeze amid the global oversupply, with Iran signaling it was not ready to commit any time soon.
US benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for delivery in April slumped 1.32 (3.4 percent) to 37.18 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
In London, Brent North Sea crude for May delivery, the European benchmark for oil, finished at 39.53 a barrel, down 86 cents (2.1 percent) from Friday’s settlement.
The downturn in the market Monday, following a rebound on Friday, reflects “concern about whether or not OPEC is going to get a meeting put together,” said Phil Flynn of Price Futures Group.
Russian energy minister Alexander Novak said Monday that a meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers to discuss a deal to freeze production levels will likely take place in April instead of this month, as earlier predicted.
Russia and three OPEC producers — audi Arabia, Venezuela and Qatar — said in February they were ready to freeze their output at January levels if other oil-producing countries joined their initiative.
But Iran reportedly announced over the weekend that it would only join a potential production cap after its output has reached pre-sanction levels of 4.0 million barrels per day (bpd).
“Iran’s position is that it needs to retrieve its pre-sanction production levels within the framework of OPEC quotas,” Novak said. “The country could join the freeze later.”
According to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’ monthly report released Monday, Iran pumped out 3.1 million bpd of crude in February, up from 2.9 million in January.
Overall production by the 13-nation cartel fell by 175,000 barrels per day in February to average 32.28 million bpd, largely because of a steep drop in Iraq and to a lesser extent in Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates, the report said.
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