Saudi Arabia's oil minister said Tuesday that the kingdom has enough oil in the ground to meet global demand for decades to come and that there is no plan to curb daily output, even as rising inventories help ease prices below $50 a barrel. Ali Naimi said the world's largest petroleum exporter that it is in Saudi Arabia's financial interest to try to bring down very high prices, which hinder economic growth and sap demand. "I stand here to tell you that Saudi Arabian reserves are plentiful, and we stand ready to raise output as the market dictates," Naimi said at a conference that brought him and U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman together, publicly, for the first time. Although Naimi's message was conciliatory toward the U.S., the world's largest energy consuming nation, his words failed to impress the market. While prices have come down from a high above $58 a barrel early last month, light, sweet crude for June delivery rose 36 cents on Tuesday to settle at $48.97 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Bodman said oil consumption is rising at a pace that is challenging the world's producers at the moment, but he said high prices will moderate consumption and encourage suppliers to develop more reserves. "The question is: How rapidly can we respond?" said the energy secretary, who encouraged Americans to think about ways they can use energy more efficiently. Oil analyst John Kilduff at Fimat USA in New York, a brokerage unit of French bank Societe Generale, said OPEC reacted too quickly to falling prices last year, a reference to OPEC's decision in December to cut output by 1 million barrels per day. Then in March, after prices had shot up, the cartel returned half that amount to the market.