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OPEC President Says Very Concerned by Lower Oil Price | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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VIENNA (Reuters) -OPEC President Edmund Daukoru said on Saturday he was very concerned by the fall in oil prices and it presented the exporter group with issues to discuss at its meeting on Monday.

Crude prices have dropped sharply, to around $66, since they hit a record $78.40 a barrel in July.

“We’ll have a more interesting agenda to discuss this time,” Nigeria’s Daukoru told reporters. “The price has dropped $10 within a month and we have been producing above quote for a very long time at a time when the market is softening, so I think we will have some issues to discuss.”

Asked if OPEC needed to take barrels off the market, the minister said: “I don’t know what we will conclude but we have been producing above quota systematically.”

“We are more or less on autopilot, I think we are going to have to take over the manual control.”

OPEC’s output ceiling of 28 million barrels per day has been in place since July 2005.