Iran Wants OPEC Oil Production Monitoring Committees Scrapped

Iran is calling on OPEC to have its two committees set up to monitor compliance with the OPEC+ deal and review the state of the oil market stop working immediately, Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zangeneh wrote in a letter to OPEC Secretary General Mohammad Barkindo.

The Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) and the Joint Technical Committee (JTC) are regularly reviewing the state of the oil market and are tracking the production and compliance levels of the deal.

To offset reduced supply from Venezuela and Iran, OPEC and its non-OPEC allies agreed in June to relax compliance rates with the cuts to 100 percent from the previous over-compliance. The respective leaders of the OPEC and non-OPEC nations part of the deal—Saudi Arabia and Russia—have been interpreting the eased compliance as adding a total of 1 million bpd to the market. Iran, however, has insisted that the easing of the compliance doesn’t mean a production boost, which is the interpretation of almost all other members of the pact, including Tehran’s arch-rival Saudi Arabia. 

In his letter to OPEC’s Secretary General, Iranian minister Zangeneh wrote, as carried by the oil ministry’s news service Shana, “Given the performance of the JMMC and JTC over recent months, we have regrettably noticed that these two committees have deviated from their initial objectives for which they were established, and some OPEC members of these two committees have clearly taken side with the US in imposing its unilateral and unlawful sanctions against I.R.Iran, and are turning these two committees into political tools in support of the US policies against I.R.Iran.”

“In my view, continuation of the activity of these two committees does not secure the collective interests of the OPEC, and as long as the mandate and missions of these two committees are not thoroughly defined and approved by the OPEC Conference, their activities are not justifiable, and therefore, they should immediately stop their work,” Zangeneh wrote in the letter to Barkindo.

“Undoubtedly, any reports and/or recommendations provided by these two committees are not acceptable,” the letter also says.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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