VIENNA, Sept 20: Opec will make an extra two million more barrels per day available to oil markets from October 1 if there is demand for the crude, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said on Tuesday in a statement.

“The conference agreed to make available to the market spare capacity of around two million bpd ... for a period of three months starting from October 1 2005,” an Opec spokesman quoted the statement as saying.

Opec will maintain its official production at 28 million barrels per day, he told a press conference in Vienna.

The new spike illustrated that Opec, which had mooted the two million barrel offer on Monday, now has little influence on oil markets, where many analysts questioned if the cartel really had much more crude in stock.

A second option that was considered here would have raised the official Opec quota by 500,000 bpd to 28.5 million.

Opec provides about 40 per cent of the world’s oil and currently produces about 30.3 million bpd, or close to 28.4 million excluding production from Iraq which is not included in the cartel’s current official quota of 28 million.

But increased output by Opec members over the past two years failed to soften the impact of what some call a third “oil shock” following those of 1973 and 1979, and has left the cartel with little spare production capacity, the International Monetary Fund said in a draft report due for release Wednesday in Washington.

—AFP