Opec’s president said separately that if oil prices were rise to $100 per barrel, the group would agree to boost production at its planned meeting in December to try to protect the nascent recovery.

Opec President Jose Botelho de Vasconcelos, who also is Angola’s oil minister, said that both producers and consumers were comfortable with oil prices at between $75 and $80 per barrel and that higher prices could put a brake on the worldwide economy.

“I think that a balanced price is always better,” Botelho de Vasconcelos said, before boarding a flight to Brazil late on Sunday.

The UAE’s Al Hamili, speaking in Moscow, declined to predict what Opec — which pumps about one-third of the world’s crude — would decide to do when its oil ministers meet on December 22 in Luanda, Angola.

“The market is well supplied. There is a lot of oil in the market. If markets want more oil, we have more,” he told a conference in the Russian capital.

Opec, in its most recent forecast, said that it expects world oil demand to fall this year by 1.4 million barrels per day, Al Hamili said.

“We have to wait and see first of all how the world economy is recovering. Now there are signs of a recovery,” he said, adding that recovery hopes and speculation were key drivers of the rise in oil prices over the past two months.

Nobuo Tanaka, head of the International Energy Agency, told the same Moscow conference that he believed global energy prices could spike within the next several years as a result of under-investment and possibly lead to a supply crunch in 2014 or 2015.

Opec has restrained its output since September 2008, when the financial crisis began to dent demand and put downward pressure on prices.

·         business@khaleejtimes.com

·         With inputs from Agencies