July 29, 2003	Tuesday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 28, 1424

LONDON, July 28: The price of oil trickled lower on Monday as traders looked to the Opec oil cartel to maintain its official output quota at a meeting in Vienna later this week.

The price of reference Brent North Sea crude oil for September delivery dropped 43 cents per barrel to $27.68.

New York’s light sweet crude benchmark September contract lost 32 cents to $29.77 in early trading.

Traders were looking ahead to an extraordinary gathering of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries on Thursday, the second in as many months.

But with prices within Opec’s target band of $22 to $28 per barrel the cartel was widely tipped to bide its time as Iraqi crude starts to drip back to world markets.

Opec’s benchmark price of seven crudes worldwide stood at $27.38 per barrel on Friday against $27.23 a day earlier.

“The sentiment on the market is that the Opec meeting won’t add anything to the market, it is irrelevant,” said GNI trader Robert Laughlin.

“Iraqi production has been back over one million barrels a day, still short of the 2.5 million pre-war production,” he added.

Expectations of a roll-over of current quotas were fuelled by United Arab Emirates oil minister Obeid bin Saif al-Nasseri, who said on Sunday the “most likely outcome of the meeting is keeping the production ceiling in its present state.”—AFP