Some Ministers Say Agreement Is Near : OPEC Set to Meet Again on Production Quotas

Ministers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, sidetracked over the weekend, are scheduled to reconvene today in an effort to regain their stride and drive up oil prices.

Some OPEC ministers claimed that a series of committee meetings on Sunday had led to progress on troublesome details of their plan to trim oil output by at least 5%, and they insisted that an agreement is just a few days away.

Analysts observing the OPEC session generally agreed that the disputes that caused a full committee meeting to break up Saturday--snags over how to cut production and stepped-up Iraqi bombing of Iran--won’t necessarily prevent a prompt agreement.

The chief reason for the continued optimism is Saudi Arabia’s willingness to trim production, a reversal of its public position before the meeting. That appeared to put the Saudis, OPEC’s biggest producer, in general agreement with the other members.

“They were just overly enthusiastic at first,” said one European analyst, referring to predictions that the talks would be finished on the weekend. “I still think they’ll be done in a couple of days.”

Delegates from OPEC’s 13 member nations gathered Thursday for their sixth meeting of the year to find ways of boosting crude oil prices to $18 a barrel, a rise of $4 to $5. That could raise prices at the pumps by 10 cents a gallon.

The cartel is trying to come up with a complex formula of fixed prices and nation-by-nation cutbacks in daily oil output, a task complicated by the different needs and oil reserves of the 13 nations. In addition to finding a formula satisfactory to all of the members, OPEC must also resolve Iran’s insistence that military foe Iraq, now exempted from the cartel’s temporary production quotas, be subjected to the same limits as everyone else.

It is also understood that OPEC, trying to shake an image of indecisiveness and confusion that has developed amid this year’s collapse in crude oil prices, hopes to fashion an agreement that will hold throughout 1987 to replace the series of temporary production quotas that were imposed in August and renewed in October.

Those quotas of about 17 million barrels a day returned oil prices to the $13 to $15 range after crude dropped below $10 last summer.