The recovery of crude oil price to eventually top $60/barrel would hurt the OPEC, outweighing any benefits of higher prices on the world market for the member countries, ISNA quoted Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh as saying after meeting with Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak.
According to him, higher prices would spur competitors to significantly increase production and the resulting oversupply would trigger a price decline despite the OPEC production cut.
As the OPEC's cut would be filled by other oil producers, this would lead to lower oil revenues for the participants of the production cut agreement signed by OPEC and eleven non-OPEC states in November 2016.
"Oil production rise is also imminent from the US thanks to Donald Trump and to the fact that a former CEO of the world's largest oil company and a man engaged in the field of oil production for a long time [ExxonMobil's Rex Tillerson] holds a role of the Secretary of State in the US administration", the minister noted.
He also announced that Iran will begin selling 100,000 barrels of oil a day to Russia within the next 15 days and receive payment half in cash and half in goods and services.
Analysts warn a rise in U.S. production not only threatens to undermine efforts by OPEC and non-OPEC producers to ease the global glut of crude, but concerns over the threat of losing market share to North American producers could also undermine future cooperation within the cartel.
OPEC reached an agreement on Nov. 30 to cut production from January by 1.2 million barrels a day to end a persistent oil glut. Later in December, Russia and other producers outside the group committed to take 558,000 barrels a day out of the market.
