DUBAI, March 24 - OPEC President Abdullah al-Attiyah said on Monday that well-supplied oil markets could set the stage for a steep oil price decline once a U.S.-led war on fellow OPEC producer Iraq is finished. "I don't believe there is any shortage at the moment," Attiyah, also oil minister of Qatar, told CNN in an interview. He said excess supplies on global markets could eventually could lead to a price collapse once hostilities, now in their fifth day, cease. "Today I am sure there is more oil in the market...my concern is what will happen later on when we see the price of oil fall very dramatically," he said. Attiyah said the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries could manage a temporary outage in fellow member Nigeria, where tribal warfare has shut down about 29 percent, or a little more than 570,000 barrels per day (bpd), of production.
"I believe this is a temporary event," he said. "We saw it in the past and we managed very carefully to balance that."//