Saudi Arabia's oil minister Ali Al-Naimi delivered the news as he left a meeting of the cartel in Vienna.
Oil prices plummeted over 3% to $72.11 a barrel following the announcement. In June, prices were as high as $115 a barrel.
"The oil ministers are happy, so I am happy," Abdalla Salem el-Badri, OPEC's Libyan-born secretary general said in a news conference. He brushed aside concerns about too much oil on the market leading to declining prices and said OPEC was looking for a fair price. He said the group does not target a maximum or minimum price.
"We are not tying to send signals to anybody," el-Badri said. "We should not rush or panic, we have to wait for the
market to settle. The decline in prices that we have seen does not reflect fundamentals."
Energy ministers from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, led by Saudi Arabia, are in Austria against the backdrop of oil prices that are at their lowest levels in four years. That drop is partly a result of output that is running ahead of demand. It is also being driven by a boom in shale production in the United States.
OPEC on Thursday re-committed to a production target of 30 million barrels a day.
"It was anti-climatic and expected," said Jamie Webster, an an energy analyst at IHS, a consultancy. "The concern I have next is that (OPEC) is just not going to go below 30 million barrels ever. If that's the case we could be in for a really wild ride over the next few months. I am very surprised that they didn't have any discussion about having another meeting before June next year."
OPEC countries account for 40% of global oil production. The group has exceeded its output target of 30 million barrels a day by about 600,000 barrels a day for the past six months.
Ahead of the meeting, Saudi Arabia's al-Naimi said he expected oil markets to "stabilize," thus lowering expectations that a reduction in supply would take place. However, some of OPEC's poorer members, such as Venezuela and Nigeria, were thought to be aggressively pushing for a cut because they need a higher oil prices to sustain their economies.
The fair price for all OPEC members is different," Iranian oil minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh told journalists at the conference on Thursday. "We hope that OPEC will arrive at a price that is acceptable for all OPEC countries to allow them to continue producing and to help support their economies."
Due to ongoing economic sanctions over its nuclear program, Iran's ability to sell its oil on world markets is restricted.Opening the one-day summit, Abdourhman Ataher Al-Ahirish, Libya's vice prime minister for corporations, said: "It is important to recognize that if the recent price trend continues, the long-term sustainability of capacity expansion plans and investment projects may be put at risk."
He said that global oil demand would grow by around 1.1 millions barrels a day in 2015 to hit 92.3 million barrels a day.
