As oil producers gear up to meet in Doha, Qatar, this weekend, experts do not anticipate that output cuts will result from the gathering.
Instead, "we're going to have the first stage of a tentative agreement on a production cap," Kent Moors, executive chairman of Energy Capital Research Group, told CNBC's "Power Lunch" on Wednesday. "What we're going to have here is a cap on traders expectations," he said, adding this is more important than the actual amount of oil entering the market.
Moors said that a limit on expectations should sustain a $42 to $45 a barrel trading range for oil.
Still, if the meeting results in a decision to freeze output, while the market will be supportive of that, global oil producers might not follow through with the deal, according to Kyle Cooper, managing partner at Criterion Research.
"The reality is that they rarely, rarely actually do what they say," he said. "It's going to be tough to be sure, because you really won't see the actual physical data for another couple of months."
Conversely, the market has been fixated on a output cap, so in the case that producers do decide to stay idle that would dampen expectations, Cooper told "Power Lunch" on Wednesday.
U.S. oil settled lower Wednesday after earlier spiking to a 2016 high on mixed government data that showed a greater-than-expected build in crude stockpiles, strong gasoline demand and falling U.S. oil output.
Internationally traded Brent was down 61 cents at $44.08 a barrel Wednesday, after rising to a new 2016 high of $44.94 following the release of the EIA figures. U.S. crude settled down 41 cents at $41.76, having hit an intraday peak of $42.42, also a high for the year.
"We build 7 million barrels today in total petroleum inventory," Cooper said. "That's a million barrel a day over supply."
— Reuters contributed to this report.
