OPEC Meeting

What is OPEC Meeting?

OPEC Meeting means the Meeting of the OPEC Conference and the wider OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting, called ONOMM for short. OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, is the Vienna based producer group that publishes the decisions. The ONOMM format, under the Declaration of Cooperation framework between OPEC and producers led by Russia, sets crude, meaning unrefined oil, output limits.

It covers 12 OPEC members plus allies, sets quotas, meaning maximum allowed output, and includes no United States figures or prices. OPEC was founded at the Baghdad Conference by 5 countries, and it aims for a stable oil market with transparent long term guidance.

When is it released and what happens each release?

The OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting, or ONOMM, holds every 6 months under the ordinary OPEC conference schedule. The Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee, or JMMC, a market review body, meets every 2 months and can call extra ministerial meetings when needed. Meetings take place in Vienna or by videoconference, with decisions published the same day as a press release on opec.org with no fixed clock time. Each release states held or extended quotas plus an attached country table, announces the next meeting date, and is never revised.

Policy evolves from meeting to meeting through extended levels, tapered steps, or added voluntary adjustments. Overproduction must be made up afterwards through a compensation mechanism, meaning make up cuts.

What moves OPEC Meeting?

Decisions move on 4 binding parts that the committee reviews before each meeting.

• Required production levels: the binding quota table that caps each country crude output for the period.
• Additional voluntary adjustments: extra cuts by some producers layered on top of required levels.
• JMMC review inputs: market conditions, output levels, and conformity, meaning measured compliance with quotas, reviewed with Joint Technical Committee support.
• Secondary source assessment: the average of 7 approved data sources used instead of self reported output to check compliance.

A past extraordinary ministerial meeting held by videoconference agreed a record staged cut. Total cuts were 9.7 million barrels per day for 2 months, then 7.7 for 6 months, then 5.8 for 16 months. Baselines, meaning starting output for cut math, were an agreed reference level, except two named producers at 11.0 each. The plan showed how headline cuts run through country quotas in preset reduction steps that following meetings extend.

How is OPEC Meeting calculated?

1. Required level: table value agreed at the meeting, sometimes shown as baseline minus cut share. Actual output is the average of 7 approved secondary sources.
2. Conformity gap: actual output minus required level, with overproduction owed back afterwards through compensation, meaning make up cuts. Illustrative example with invented figures uses baseline 10.000 mb/d, meaning million barrels per day, minus cut share 1.000 to give required level 9.000. If actual output averages 9.100 then the gap is 0.100, owed as extra underproduction in a following month.

Key point: It is not United States data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meaning the federal statistics agency, and it does not set prices. OPEC publishes quotas on opec.org, while the United States takes no part and feels only indirect price effects.