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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