Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh has called on the United States and Canada to join non-OPEC oil producers led by Russia to reduce crude production.
In a tweet on Tuesday, Namdar Zanganeh said, "Before any meeting between OPEC and non-OPEC there needs to be an agreement on production numbers for any country that will reduce output", adding that the U.S. and Canada need to play a role in determining production cuts.
Referring to his teleconference with the chairman of OPEC and the Oil Ministers of Kuwait and Russia, Namdar Zanganeh noted that details concerning OPEC's next conference were discussed.
An OPEC video-conference was set to be held on Monday but it was postponed to Thursday.
Meanwhile, in a statement on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Energy asserted that U.S. output is already falling without government action, in line with the White House’s insistence that it would not intervene in the private markets. That decline, however, would take place slowly, over the course of the next two years.
Russia and Saudi Arabia have already noted that they will only agree to deep cuts to their crude output if the United States and several others join in with curbs to help prop up prices that have been hammered by the coronavirus crisis.
Earlier, President Donald Trump had expressed hope that Russia and Saudi Arabia might reduce their oil output to ten million barrels per day (BPD) to keep the market stable.
While it is not yet clear whether Washington will relent to cut its oil output, President Trump has suggested that Russia and Saudi Arabia should bear the brunt.
Furthermore, he has threatened Russia and Saudi Arabia with tariffs on their oil to protect the American oil industry.
"I think the cuts are automatic if you are a believer in markets," he said on Monday, reiterating his remarks last week after a meeting with several oil industry giants ended without a public plan for tackling the oil market’s historic crash.
Brent oil price dropped from nearly seventy dollars per barrel in early 2020 to about twenty dollars amid the novel coronavirus outbreak, and OPEC members failed to reduce their output. An OPEC agreement after more talks about reducing output, helped the price to recover a bit, reaching $30 a barrel.
