OPEC Splits on Extra Production : Members Clash on Dividing Additional 200,000 Barrels

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was locked in acrimonious dispute Monday over how to divide up 200,000 barrels of additional production.

It was the 15th day of the longest ministerial meeting in OPEC’s 26-year history.

The dispute is holding up final agreement on whether to extend until the end of the year a temporary ceiling on total OPEC production in order to hold the world price level at about $14 a barrel. Failure to extend the ceiling will almost certainly result in the price falling back to below $10 a barrel, the level reached in July.

In August, the 13 members of OPEC agreed on a production ceiling of 16.8 million barrels a day, to remain in effect until the end of October. Now, after two weeks of wrangling, they are in general agreement on raising the ceiling to 17 million barrels a day, but for the past two days they have been arguing about how to divide up the extra 200,000 barrels of production.

Gabon’s oil minister has already left Geneva, and the Iraqi oil minister, Kassim Ahmed Taki, was preparing Monday to head for home.

The Saudi Arabian oil minister, Ahmed Zaki Yamani, who often acts as power broker for the organization, proposed last Friday that the production ceiling be increased and that the additional 200,000 barrels be divided among Kuwait, Gabon, Ecuador and Qatar. But on Sunday, Kuwait unexpectedly demanded 90,000 of the 200,000 barrels.

Because Kuwait is much wealthier, on the basis of per-capita income, than either Gabon or Ecuador, its demand outraged almost all the other members.

An Ecuadoran official said: “How could we go home and try to explain to our government and people that a wealthy state like Kuwait was given a big increase out of the extra 200,000 barrels while we got very little?”

Most of the past two weeks has been taken up with arguments over an entirely new quota system. At the outset of the meeting, Saudi Arabia demanded that the quotas be overhauled so that in the future any adjustment of global production would be allocated by percentages instead of quotas.

But no agreement could be reached on the criteria by which percentages might be fixed--on proven oil reserves, on per-capita income, on population, on gross national product, on production capacity, on oil quality, on export needs or on some other factor.

The Saudis finally agreed Friday to another temporary extension of the August ceiling. The meeting is expected to continue today.