According to financial information agency Bloomberg, the virtual meetings were postponed for two days to give more time to the negotiations after Monday's meeting was unsuccessful.
On Thursday, the 13 OPEC countries, which include Lusophone Angola and Equatorial Guinea, will meet with a broader set of producers, known as OPEC+, including Russia, to try to reach agreement on increasing production or maintaining cuts during the first quarter of 2021.
Some cartel members consider that the market is still too fragile to absorb an increase in production, while others intend to take advantage of the rise in prices to increase production and hence revenue, Bloomberg writes.
"The impact of the pandemic on the oil industry is tremendous and will be felt in the coming years," warned Algeria's Energy Minister Abdelmadjid Attar, who holds the rotating chairmanship of OPEC and spoke at the opening of the organization's ministerial video conference on Monday.
World demand for oil will fall this year by 9.8 million barrels a day compared to last year, and will recover by 6.1 million barrels a day in 2021, he said.
Just before the beginning of the conference, the Russian agency TASS said that several OPEC+ countries defend a gradual increase in production.
"Some countries, including Russia, want to gradually increase [production] from January," considering that the situation is now more favorable than in the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic last spring, noted an OPEC source.
Others want to extend "for several months" the current cut of 7.7 million barrels per day in effect since August, a cut that runs until 31 December.
