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Tehran Closing In on Pre - Sanctions Oil Target

TIN news:   A senior oil official on Saturday said Iran is now pumping more than 3.5 million barrels of oil per day, meaning it is now some half a million barrels away from its highest crude output level seen before international sanctions against it were intensified in 2012.
"Oil exports in April have reached an average of 2 million barrels a day," Rokneddin Javadi, deputy oil minister and the chief executive of National Iranian Oil Company, said on Saturday.
Javadi was addressing a conference assessing the impact of Iran's Resistance Economy policy in the petroleum industry.
The calculated statement comes a day ahead of a crunch meeting between OPEC and non-OPEC producing nations in Doha, Qatar, which are set to discuss freezing oil output to shore up prices.
Javadi's data are in accordance with a report published by Bloomberg earlier this week that Iran's average oil exports in the first two weeks of April exceeded the 2-million-bpd mark.
Iran’s crude shipments have risen by more than 600,000 bpd this month, the report said, adding that international vessels carried about 28.8 million barrels of crude, or more than 2 million bpd, from the Persian Gulf country’s ports in the first 14 days of April.
That compares with a rate of about 1.45 million barrels a day in March.
After reaching a historic accord with six world powers in July on its nuclear program, Tehran said it will steadily ramp up crude output it lost to rival producers, such as OPEC's de facto leader Saudi Arabia, which has been producing at record-high levels in the past several months.
But Tehran and Riyadh have increasingly found themselves at loggerheads over a series of political and economic disputes.
Iran says it will not join the freeze talks before reaching its pre-sanctions oil production level of 4 million bpd. Saudi Arabia, which spearheaded the output freeze plan along with Russia in February, says it will not support the initiative unless Iran comes on board.
The Iranian Oil Ministry's news agency Shana reported on Friday Iran's OPEC Governor Hossein Kazempour Ardebili will attend the meeting on Sunday instead of Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh. The message is clear: Iran will not compromise on its oil plans.
However, Reuters on Saturday quoted two sources familiar with the situation as saying that Iran will not attend the meeting in Qatar on Sunday. They noted that Iran had been informed that only those countries willing to agree to freeze their output level should attend.
Iran has said it supports the freeze but would not join it until it raises its output and market share to their pre-sanctions levels.
Sanctions imposed by the United States and other world powers were lifted in January in return for Tehran agreeing to temporary curbs on its nuclear program.
A rise in Iran's oil output will undermine efforts to rebalance the market in 2016, a Reuters poll of oil analysts showed this week.

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