(Xinhua)
Updated: 2008-05-09 11:13

VIENNA -- General Secretary of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Abdullah Salem El-Badri said here on Thursday although the oil prices rose sharply in recent months, there was clearly no oil shortage in the market.

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He said in a statement that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) commercial oil stocks remained above the five-year average. Meanwhile, US crude inventories rose about 6 million barrels last week, which showed that the oil market was well-supplied.

El-Badri pointed out that crude oil movements had showed that some member countries could not even find buyers for their additional oil supply.

He insisted that the crazily rising prices could not reflect the fundamentals. The soaring prices were mainly driven by financial market developments and the increasing speculations in oil market which encouraged by the significantly depreciation of the US dollars.

El-Badri added that OPEC would be ready to act at anytime if the market shows a need for any further measures.

The OPEC member countries' daily average output remained more than 32 million barrels. In addition, a number of new OPEC crude oil projects have started to come on-stream and the current OPEC spare capacity is over 3 million barrels per day, according to El-Badri.