Tehran, PIN, 16/03/2010

TEHRAN (Shana) - Iran's petroleum minister Masoud Mirkazemi arrived in Vienna to attend the 156th OPEC ministerial conference, which is going to be held in its new headquarters in Vienna on 17 March.

Prior to holding the ministerial meeting, Dr. Mirkazemi is going to take part in the Ministerial Monitoring Sub-Committee (MMC) holding today (16 March) to review oil markets situation.

MMC consists of Iran as the head, plus Nigeria and Kuwait. General Secretary of OPEC also attends the MMC meetings.

The committee reviews oil market status and provides a report to ministerial meeting about the oil markets situation.

Inventory levels and the compliance to production quotas are among the other topics on the agenda.

a great number of oil ministers, analysts and experts have predicted that OPEC would not change the output ceiling.

OPEC has left its output ceiling unchanged for more than a year since announcing a record supply curb of 4.2 million bpd in December 2008 to combat lower demand and prices, which were both hit by the economic crisis.