'We will continue this reduction until the price will stabilise,' he told reporters in the sidelines of a conference of oil ministers in London, two days after Opec had agreed to cut output by 2.2 million barrels per day (bpd).

The Opec cut, agreed at a meeting in Algeria, failed to reverse the fall in crude prices which fell to four-year lows below US$40 (S$58) a barrel on Thursday.

Mr Khelil, who is also Algeria's energy minister, said prices could have gone even lower if the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries had not already made cuts in September and October.

'I think the question that people don't ask is where would the price be today if we did not take a decision in September of reducing 500,000 (bpd), and if we did not make the decision in October to reduce by 1.5 (million bpd),' he said.

'The prices today would have been very very low, so I think we did have an impact although we did not succeed in stabilising,' he added.

And he added: 'The most important thing for us, for the producers, is how to monitor control and regulate the financial speculation which affects the oil price, whether oil price is going up and down.

'We feel very strongly that what happened in 2008 and what's happening now is due in great part to the speculation,' he added. -- AFP