Saudi Arabia will call for a summit between oil producing countries and consumer states to discuss soaring energy prices, Information and Culture Minister Iyad Madani said Monday.

The kingdom will also work with OPEC to “guarantee the availability of oil supplies now and in the future,” the minister said following the weekly Cabinet meeting, held in the seaport city of Jiddah.

Madani said that the kingdom has informed “all oil companies it deals with as well as countries that consume oil that (the kingdom) is ready to provide them with any additional oil they need.”

“The Saudi Cabinet has instructed Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi to call for a meeting in the near future that will include representatives of oil-producing countries, consumers and companies that work in extracting, exporting and selling oil to look into the price hike, its causes and how to deal with it,” Madani said.

The kingdom will work to ensure there will be no “unwarranted and unnatural oil price hikes that could affect international economies, especially those of developing countries,” Madani said.

“There is no justification for the current rise in prices,” he said.

It’s just talk

The Saudi announcement comes just three days after the biggest single-day price leap ever, when oil surged more than $11 to surpass $139 per barrel.

Jim Ritterbusch, president of the U.S.-based energy consultancy Ritterbusch and Associates cautioned that such meetings have taken place in the past and could be more an effort to calm the market without taking concrete measures.

“It’s not anywhere near as significant as if they called an emergency OPEC meeting,” he said. “It seems to me to be more political than anything … They’re reaching their worry threshold.”

The Saudis are concerned that sustained high oil prices will eventually slacken the world’s appetite for oil, affecting them in the long run.

Investors last month shrugged off news that Saudi Arabia had increased production by 300,000 barrels a day after a visit from President Bush, who sought a major production increase.

Energy experts say most producers have little ability to expand output. The exception is Saudi Arabia, which is producing about 9.4 million barrels a day and has the ability to increase production by about 2 million barrels a day, but has not done so.

The current president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Chakib Khelil, has said that the cartel will make no new decision on production levels until its Sept. 9 meeting in Vienna.

$150 a barrel?

If oil stays near $139 a barrel, the high it set last week, gas prices will probably rise another dime in the coming days, said Tom Kloza, publisher and chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service in Wall, N.J.

An AAA spokesman said prices could rise another 2 to 3 cents.

Drivers have shown signs of cutting back as gas prices go ever higher, but gas producers have little choice but to keep raising prices when the cost of their most important raw material, crude oil, goes up.

At today’s prices, it costs nearly $91 to fill a Ford Explorer, up from $70 a year ago. A person who drives that Explorer 25 to 40 miles to and from work, not to mention chauffeuring kids around, has to gas up twice a week at least.

A Morgan Stanley analyst’s prediction that oil would hit $150 helped drive the rally on Friday. At that rate, gas would cost about $4.40 a gallon, Kloza said.