MOSCOW, September 27. /TASS/. Summer is the best period of time for expiry of the OPEC+ oil production limiting agreement. Oil demand is usually growing in summer, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on Wednesday in an interview with Austria’s Die Presse newspaper.

"It’s better to end the agreement during the growing demand period. It usually takes place in summer. When the demand will grow, everyone should gradually withdraw from the agreement," Novak said.

"When we negotiated the production cut first time on December 10, we immediately addressed growing production in the US," Novak said responding to a question regarding the impact of oil prices on oil production in the United States. "Such growth indeed took place but remained not very significant in recent months. The potential is simply not enough. We noticed again that analysts made an error. We will continue monitoring the situation in normal way. Production reduction in any case has more upsides than downsides," he added.

In late 2016, OPEC member-states and 11 independent oil-exporting countries entered into an agreement to reduce oil production. According to that agreement, during the first half of 2017 the participants were to withdraw 1.8 million barrels per day from the oil market in comparison with the level of October 2016.

In May 2017, at the meeting in Vienna, the countries extended the agreement until April 2018, maintaining the previous quotas for all participants. The purpose of the agreement is to reduce global oil reserves to the average level of the last five years.