OPEC weekly oil price drops 0.93 dollars to 53.45

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)'s weekly average crude oil price fell slightly to 53.45 U.S. dollars per barrel, down 0.93 dollars from the previous week, the cartel's secretariat said on Monday.

It is the first fall since the cartel's weekly oil price continued rising for three weeks, the secretariat said.

The unusual late cold temperatures has lent strong support to the crude oil prices over the past weeks, however, as the end of winter approaches, the U.S. fuel inventories are expected to be sufficient to meet heating demand in the world's largest energy consumer, market analysts said.

According to some weather analysts, temperatures in much of the northeast of the U.S. will be above average in the coming week, and warmer weather is also going to move into the eastern half of the United States.

The crude oil price fall came amid an unrest in Nigeria, Africa's largest crude producer and also the world's sixth-biggest exporter of crude oil.

Over recent months, dozens of foreigners have been kidnapped in the violent region, and Nigerian police said that almost at the same time of the release of an American oil worker, three Croatians were kidnapped on Sunday in southern Nigeria's oil capital Port Harcourt.

Meanwhile, Iran's oil minister said on Saturday that the oil cartel would not institute any further cut at its next official meeting in March, if the current prices of crude oil remain as they are now.

"If the oil prices remain at the current levels, there will probably be no need for an additional cut," Kazem Vaziri Hamaneh was quoted as saying on the sidelines of an international refining forum in Tehran.

However, the cartel's new general secretary Abdulla Salem held the opposite opinion and insisted that a further cut would be good.

OPEC oil ministers are scheduled to meet on March 15 in Vienna to decide the cartel's oil output in the second quarter of the year, and the cartel had already cut production by 500,000 barrels per day (bpd) from Feb. 1, following a reduction of 1.2 million bpd in November last year.

Source: Xinhua