For more than 30 years, the meetings of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have been a major event for market speculators and forecasters. OPEC meetings, as any oil trader can tell you, can make or break the price of oil instantaneously. This Sunday’s gathering of the producer cartel’s Ministers is being billed as an exception to the rule. No big decisions are likely. Oil prices are high, OPEC production is high, and the group’s members have no serious issues to discuss or reasons to make a change in policy.

But the nonevent of the January 30 OPEC meeting raises an interesting question. Does the oil community consider OPEC’s meetings a big event out of habit or based on reality?

Were a disruption or other event to start to push the price of oil higher today, OPEC has very little it could do about it. That’s because the oil group is producing about as near to flat out as it ever has. There are few oil field expansions planned for this year in Kuwait, the UAE, and Iran, but for the most part, given the strength in oil demand, these increases will have only limited impact on OPEC’s ability to add more oil to the market to keep a lid on prices. In other words, OPEC has lost control of the ceiling to the market. Short of discussing whether to bring on accelerated investment in new fields over the next two to three years, the cartel doesn’t need to meet to see if it wants to create a ceiling to the market price. It can’t.

But what about a price floor? OPEC as an organization has been very effective about maintaining its target price of $25 as an effective floor to oil price levels in recent years. But given the reality of world demand trends and OPEC’s lack of spare oil-production capacity, do they really have to meet to discuss protecting this price floor? It could be argued that only a major world recession would run the risk of pushing near-term prices down below OPEC’s price target. Such a recession does not appear to be on the horizon.

Every winter Wall Street analysts predict an oil price collapse to come in the spring, but it is hard to see what would prompt this collapse to bring prices below $25. A mild winter can shave 1 million barrels a day off demand, but there are also still concerns about terrorism, political instability in the Middle East, a still-crippled oil sector in Venezuela, a government campaign in Russia to reassert its control over the oil industry, a growing economy in China, and American drivers who insist on large cars. Given the worldwide industry’s productive capacity constraints both in oil fields and in refining, it is hard to imagine what is going to prompt this nosedive in short-term prices below $25.

So if OPEC doesn’t need to meet to create a price ceiling and if, chances are, OPEC doesn’t need to meet to defend the $25 price floor, why do they need to meet at all?

It wasn’t so long ago that OPEC met out of fear – fear that without a meeting, their oil revenues would be greatly damaged. Now, with oil revenues already on the historical high side, a meeting seems less imperative.

This has led to speculation that OPEC, which has no reason to exist if it doesn’t need to meet, will raise its price floor ideas. It would be worth meeting if $35 or $40 was the price below which the organization didn’t want prices to fall. This higher target might not be on the agenda in Vienna on Sunday or even when the group meets later in the spring. But the temptation to try to defend a higher price band will be great whether the cartel admits it openly or not. For most OPEC countries, oil revenue is the main instrument of government. Last year brought an average price of $35 to $36 a barrel for OPEC and the highest oil revenues since 1982, and life was still not easy inside OPEC countries. The group has no incentive to rock the boat. OPEC should be happy just to sit on its hands and count the money.