The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is meeting again this week facing a number of challenges that some say threatens the very relevance of the six decades-old cartel.

Oil prices have been tumbling in recent years due to a slowing in global growth and uncertainty over the prospects for a trade deal between the world's two biggest economies, the US and China.

While prices rose nearly four percent ahead of Thursday's meeting, they are still far off their 2019 peaks of $75 per barrel.

Johannes Benigni, the chairman of the JBC Energy Group based in Vienna and Singapore, says keeping the market balanced is OPEC's top priority. 

"When oil demand is not growing but supply is growing that is not good for prices so they will try to produce as much is necessary so that the market is well supplied or if there is too much, to reduce that supply."

The US has also been increasing their production of shale oil to an average of 12.4 million barrels a day, reducing their dependency on OPEC's crude oil imports while also adding to the oil export market.

Since 2017 the energy alliance, between fourteen OPEC member states led by Saudi Arabia and ten non-OPEC partners, led by Russia, has been reducing production by 1.2 million barrels a day in an effort to stabilize prices. 

It is expected that they will agree to further extend these production cuts through 2020 at this week's meeting.

Yet on Tuesday, Iraqi oil minister Thamer Ghadhban told reporters in Vienna that "a deeper cut is being preferred by a number of key members."

Johannes Benigni also agrees that this would be a good move. "I think right now the expectation is that for next year they would need to cut another close to half a million barrels per day to keep the market balanced."

Yet these cuts have been seen adversely by some smaller member states.

Qatar left the organization at the beginning of 2019 and Ecuador is expected to do the same in January to pursue their own oil output policies.

Meanwhile, over-producing members Iraq and Nigeria have been asked to bring production in line with their agreed-upon targets.

There has also been the recent announcement that the privately-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco), plans to sell 1.5 percent of its shares in a deal that could raise up to $25.6 billion and eat away at OPEC's global oil share.

When OPEC was established back in the 1960's it controlled roughly 70 percent of the world's oil supply, today that share has fallen to around 29 percent.