(Updates throughout)

ROME, April 19 (Reuters) - Oil at $117 a barrel has left energy producers and consumers in rare agreement there is little they can do for now to prevent prices rising higher still.

Oil hit the latest in a series of records on Friday after a rebel attack in Nigeria added to supply concerns and offset the impact of a U.S.-led economic slowdown, which has begun to eat into energy demand.

“There is a possibility of still going higher,” Shokri Ghanem, Libya’s top oil official, said on his arrival in Rome on Saturday for talks between producer and consumer countries.

Top fuel burner the United States has led the calls for more oil to try to calm prices, but OPEC’s biggest producer Saudi Arabia has dismissed this as political rhetoric.

“Today there is no reason to jump up and down and say ‘we will supply more crude’ -- because that request from consuming countries is probably politically-driven rather than a fundamental requirement,” Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said in an interview with industry newsletter Petroleum Argus.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has repeatedly said it will not use the International Energy Forum (IEF) in Rome as the occasion to revise its output policy.

“There will be friendly talks as usual when we see each other,” said Ghanem. “There are no plans for an official meeting.”

CONSPICUOUS ABSENCES

While nearly all of the 13 OPEC energy ministers will attend the IEF talks from Sunday to Tuesday, the group’s president Chakib Khelil of Algeria is staying away, as is U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, according to aides.

The United States is smarting from the impact of high oil prices and gasoline at more than $3 a gallon has begun to erode demand.

The head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which represents consumer countries, stopped short of calling for more oil, saying instead that stocks would build provided OPEC maintained output.

“If the producing countries maintain the current level of production, stock levels in consuming countries will come back,” said IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka. “That will give a better balanced market.”

But he said the price was too high, especially for developing countries.

Previous IEF meetings have been dismissed as talking shops, but Tanaka said the energy executives and roughly 60 ministers attending would find “common issues and common interests” and he wanted to see them all agree the price was too high.

OPEC’s second biggest producer Iran has typically supported strong oil prices.

Its energy minister said Friday’s record price did not reflect fundamentals of supply and demand and was artificially supported by the weakness of the U.S. dollar.

“It’s not the real price,” Nozari said.

A sustained bull run, which set in around 2002, has drawn momentum this year from the dollar’s slide to record lows against major European currencies, making dollar-denominated oil attractive as an inflation hedge.

Market fundamentals, including strong demand from emerging economies, such as China and India, and chronic under-investment that has tightened supply has also driven the rally.

For a factbox on the IEF double click on [ID:nL19443987]