Saudi Oil Reserves Growth Has Lagged The Rest Of The World

Despite continued skepticism about the level of Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves, their oil reserve and production metrics look pretty typical when compared to the world’s other oil-producing countries.

Conclusions

Again, as I noted in the previous article, none of this proves that Saudi Arabia has 270 billion barrels of crude oil reserves. I undertook this exercise to see if I could find anything particularly unusual about the history of Saudi Arabia’s claimed oil reserves.

But a comparison to the world’s other oil producers indicates that there is nothing extraordinary about Saudi Arabia’s reserves growth, production growth, or cumulative production since 1982. On a relative basis (i.e., in percentage terms), most of these measures are average for Saudi Arabia when compared to other countries.

In other words, there are no significant outliers that would lead one to suspect that the numbers Saudi Arabia is reporting are fabricated. If there is a metric that would flag Saudi’s reserves as suspect when comparing them to those of other countries, I haven’t found it.

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Author: Robert Rapier

Robert Rapier is a seasoned chemical engineer with three decades of international experience in the energy sector. He holds undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics, and a master’s in chemical engineering. Robert has worked extensively in oil refining, production, synthetic fuels, biomass energy, and alcohol production, earning several patents along the way. As Editor-in-Chief of Shale Magazine and a prolific author for Investing Daily, he shares his expertise through various newsletters and his latest book, American Energy: A History of Power, Progress, and Change. Robert's insights have been featured on 60 Minutes, The History Channel, CNBC, and PBS, among others. His articles have appeared in top publications like the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and The Economist. For nearly a decade, he has covered the energy sector for Forbes.