"The UAE is producing within its OPEC quota," an industry official told Reuters. Production is still in the range of 2.3 million barrels per day (bpd), while total capacity is around 2.8 million bpd, he said.
Abu Dhabi holds more than 90 percent of the UAE's oil reserves, which are tapped by state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).
"The market is already well supplied, and with the extra supply coming from some OPEC countries there might be a risk of over flooding the market. That's why the UAE is not producing more," said an official from ADNOC under condition of anonymity.
OPEC's leading exporter has promised it will provide enough oil to make up for any loss because of disruptions in OPEC member Libya.
In its most recent oil allocations report, ADNOC said it had lifted cuts in allocations of Lower Zakum, Umm Shaif and Upper Zakum crudes in April. The UAE often changes supply levels depending on customer needs, said the official.
"This does not mean the ADNOC has increased its output, and if we have a cut in one month, we might not have one in the next, but over the year it all balances out," the first official added.
Gulf oil traders said, however, that an increase of UAE supplies would not come as a surprise, given that a number of OPEC members in the Gulf had expressed the need to calm the market.
"It wouldn't be a total shock to me that the UAE may have increased output, but right now it's really too early to tell," said a Dubai-based crude trader.
Another trader also said output in Kuwait, another regional OPEC producer with spare capacity, might increase.
Oil prices hit a record high above $147 a barrel in July 2008, but OPEC producers have fresh memories of how quickly they plunged from those levels to lows near $33 a barrel six months later as the global economy fell into a tailspin.
Unrest in the region pushed oil prices last week to a 2-1/2 year high of nearly $120 a barrel, a level potentially damaging to the world economy and far above the range of $70-$80 that Saudi Arabia has repeatedly said it favors.
Prior to unrest in Tunisia and Egypt in January, OPEC members considered the world market to be amply supplied, and only as some Libyan output was shut in during recent days did Saudi Arabia move to stem oil's surge by pumping more.
Meanwhile, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Wednesday Saudi Arabia is capable of covering any Libyan oil production outage.
Brent oil prices have risen toward $116 a barrel as more regimes in North Africa and the Middle East look vulnerable to spreading protests.
The Paris-based IEA advises and coordinates energy policy for the industrialized nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
It has a mandate to ask its members to release oil stocks in the case of emergency supply disruption, but has very rarely done so.
It last did so in 2005 when it released refined products after Hurricane Katrina crippled operations in the US Gulf of Mexico.
If oil prices remain at $100 per barrel for the rest of the year, economic recovery will be difficult, especially for developing countries, Tanaka said.
But he sought to calm markets by saying IEA oil stockpiles could also be used if needed.
"We can release two million barrels per day for two years. We don't really have to worry too much about the supply side," he said, adding the situation was very different from the one in 2008, when oil prices jumped to nearly $ 150 per barrel.
A top Libyan oil official said separately on Wednesday oil prices could rise above $130 per barrel in the next month if the crisis in his country continued.
Libya, the world's 12th-largest oil exporter producing almost 2 percent of world output, has already seen its output drop by almost half due to the departure of oil workers.
