BOSTON - Oil prices fell more than 2 percent on Friday, dragged down by uncertainty over whether the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will reach an output deal, after Saudi Arabia said it will not attend talks on Monday with non-OPEC producers to discuss supply cuts. “It could be expected that OPEC members may ask non-OPEC countries to cut production volumes for the next six months starting from Jan. 1 2017 … by 880,000 barrels from the total daily production,” Azeri newspaper Respublika quoted the country’s Energy Minister, Natig Aliyev, as saying. “This will be more effective‎.”

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is trying to cement a preliminary September agreement in Algeria that would reduce its production to between 32.5 million and 33 million barrels per day, its first supply curb since 2008. OPEC has long insisted it wants non-OPEC producers to properly participate in global output cuts to support prices, citing tensions at the start of the millennium when Russia promised to join cuts but raised output instead. However, the Energy Minister of Russia, the largest non-OPEC producer, said he hadn’t heard about such a proposal, and that OPEC’s earlier suggestion had been for members outside the cartel to reduce output by 500,000 b/d. Such a cut would bring OPEC’s current output down by more than 1.2 million b/d, according to Reuters calculations based on the group’s October production, and is toward the upper end of market expectations. “It is highly probable that oil and energy ministers of the member countries of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will reach an agreement in the Nov. 30 meeting,” Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zangeneh said Nov. 19 after meeting with OPEC’s secretary general in Tehran.
Saudi Arabia tells its partners in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries that it will not attend a planned November 28 meeting in Vienna, out of unhappiness about intransigence from Iraq and Iran with regard to production cuts.