Staff of Iran's Ministry of Health and Medical Education arrange boxes of masks donated by China in Tehran, Iran, on Feb. 25, 2020. (Xinhua/Ahmad Halabisaz)

Iran does not agree with holding any OPEC+ meeting in the absence of a clear proposal and expected outcome from such talks for the oil market, the country's oil minister said in a letter to OPEC and seen by Reuters.

"The vague circumstances around which the upcoming OPEC and non-OPEC ministerial (meeting) is being organized is of grave concern to me," the minister, Bijan Zanganeh, wrote in the letter dated April 7 and addressed to the Algerian oil minister, who holds the presidency of OPEC.

Zanganeh said that organizing a meeting "in the absence of any clear and consensual outcome (to) convey to the market" would be a message of failure even before it starts, which "may aggravate the current low price environment even further."

Saudi Arabia, Russia and allied oil producers, a group known as OPEC+, will agree to deep cuts to their crude output at talks this week only if the US and several others join in with curbs to help prop up prices that have been hammered by the coronavirus crisis, OPEC+ sources said.

OPEC+ is due to hold a video conference on Thursday at 1400 GMT, after US President Donald Trump said last week that Riyadh and Moscow had agreed to cut an unprecedented 10 million to 15 million barrels per day, or about 10 percent to 15 percent of global supply. 

The US Department of Energy said on Tuesday that US output was already falling without government action, in line with the insistence of the White House that it would not intervene in the private markets. That decline, however, would take place slowly, over the course of the next two years.

Reuters