OPEC ministers, ahead of their Dec. 12 talks, are saying they want to keep output policy steady and oil prices near current levels of $50 for their reference basket (about $57 for US benchmark crude). That sets the stage for a potentially routine meeting. But there’s an interesting twist to the upcoming talks.

Typically, OPEC holds its winter meeting in Vienna, where the group established its secretariat 40 years ago. TV pictures beamed back to trading desks, of ministers clad in bulky coats and reporters scurrying among snowflakes, may add a psychological boost to prices. More than one minister over the years has emerged from his Mercedes, turned his collar up to a hawkish wind and had his declaration that frigid temperatures are good for demand flashed instantly around the world.

But what is the market to read into the venue for next week’s talks?

OPEC returns to Kuwait for the first time since 1973, a meeting at which the group set a fixed selling price of $5.12 a barrel. And, as OPEC’s official history tells it: “It was the first move by Member Countries to exercise their sovereign right to determine the price of their natural resources. From this point on, OPEC assumed the power to consider and set prices unilaterally for its oil.'’ Two months later, OPEC doubled prices to $11.651/bbl.

The rise of the futures market and non-OPEC competition have taken away OPEC’s unilateral power, but it still has considerable clout.

Rather than shiver from the Vienna cold, though, ministers are likely to sweat through temperatures near 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Kuwait.

Potentially the most onimous sign is the gathering’s status as the first winter meeting in an OPEC member country since 1997’s disastrous Jakarta talks. Back then, Saudi Arabia pushed OPEC into a 2 million-barrels-a-day rise in output quotas that was poorly timed with the start of the Asian economic crisis and an unusually warm El Nino winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Crude prices fell 16% in the months after the meeting, the start of a free fall that took more than a year to correct.

Still, recent history suggests there’s little OPEC can do next week to keep prices from rising. In the past six years (whether the group met in Vienna or non-member Egypt), oil prices have averaged 1% to 15.2% higher in the three months after the meeting than in the month in which the winter meeting was held. That translates to $60 to $68.25 in the first quarter of 2006.