OPEC Is Facing a Critical Test As Mideast Unrest Deepens

With oil-producing countries in turmoil and crude gushing to triple-digit prices, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries finds itself, at 50 years old, at a critical crossroads.

AP

OPEC, which meets Wednesday in Vienna, produces 40 percent of the world’s oil, but unrest and revolution in member countries have compromised output.

John Kilduff, an energy analyst and partner at Again Capital, said the activity in the Middle East and North Africa is "unprecedented and it’s a tremendous threat to oil production country by country.”

That threat is most notable in Libya where revolutionary forces are challenging the stranglehold of military dictator Muammar Gaddafi. It’s that struggle that closed the tap on the country’s 1.3 million barrels of production and helped push up the price of oil around the world.

Meanwhile, OPEC’s second-largest producer, Iran, threw another curveball at world markets when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

fired his country's oil minister, who had been the current president of OPEC, and took control of the ministry and, by extension, OPEC. (Under pressure, Ahmadinejad named a caretaker chief of the oil ministry.)