Saudi Arabia, which already has aggressively shaved its oil output in a battle to shore up prices, is tightening its spigots further this week, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

A senior Saudi oil official said yesterday the kingdom had advised its customers of the impending 158,000 barrel-a-day cut, which takes effect Feb. 1, according to the report.

The reductions, part of a broader campaign by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), are intended to shrink inventories of oil that had ballooned last year as demand growth for petroleum faltered, the report said.

"After these cuts, our oil production will have declined by about one million barrels a day since last summer," the senior Saudi oil official was quoted as saying.

The report said that Saudi Arabia's one million-barrel reduction is nearly double the total cuts it agreed to make under two output reductions hammered out by OPEC at meetings in Doha, Qatar, in October and in Abuja, Nigeria, in December.

The Saudi official could not be precise about Saudi output after the reduction this week but said that it would be "around 8. 5 million barrels a day." The report did not mention the official's name.

The 10 members of OPEC that committed to reduce their output were producing about 27.5 million barrels a day in September. The agreed-upon cuts, if fully implemented, would bring the group's output down to 25.8 million barrels a day in a global oil market of about 85 million barrels a day, according to the report.

Source: Xinhua