SAUDI Arabia may announce an oil output increase at a meeting it will host in Jeddah on Sunday for oil producers and consumers because customers are asking for more crude, an OPEC official said last Friday.
There is more demand for Saudi oil from "all over" the world, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' official, who asked not to be identified, said in a phone interview. He declined to comment on the size of the possible increase, and denied reports that the Saudi Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi would make a statement on oil production.
State-owned Saudi Aramco said last Friday that it will start pumping oil from its 500,000-barrel-a-day Khursaniyah field within a month. The country proposed to host the Jeddah summit after oil prices more than doubled in a year to a record US$139.12 a barrel on June 6. Crude oil fell last Friday to settle at US$134.86 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange as al-Naimi said prices were "unjustified."
Saudi Arabia pumped 9.134 million barrels of crude a day last month, according to a monthly report from OPEC which cited secondary sources including analysts and news agencies. The country's crude output was 9.25 million barrels a day in May, according to Bloomberg News estimates.
Saudi's King Abdullah will do all he can to bring oil prices down to "adequate levels," the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said after meeting the monarch, Agence France-Presse reported.
King Abdullah told the UN official that oil prices were "abnormally high," according to AFP.