Today's meeting of the Opec+ Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) has been delayed by several hours as discussions around reworking production baselines drag on.
The meeting, which was originally due to begin at 10:00 Vienna time (08:00 GMT), was formally pushed back by an hour, according to a circular issued by the Opec secretariat, to allow more time for multilateral and bilateral discussions. But by 16:20 Vienna time, two delegate sources said the JMMC had yet to convene as pre-meeting discussions on the sidelines continue.
At the heart of those pre-meeting talks is a plan to recalibrate crude output baselines for several countries in the Opec+ coalition in order to better reflect their current production capacities. Baselines ꟷ the production level on which individual countries' cuts are calculated under the Opec+ deal ꟷ have been a point of contention for a number of members in the group who believe they should be allowed to pump more than they currently are.