What Country Is the World’s Largest Oil Producer?
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is often cited as the largest oil producer in the world. The country produces 13.24% of the oil consumed daily worldwide. Saudi Arabia has the second largest reserves of natural species oil in the world after Venezuela. Saudi Arabia’s oil resources are estimated at 260 billion barrels of oil.
Biofuels, liquid fuel and shale gas
However, if you take into account the production of biofuels and liquid fuel produced from natural gas as well as oil production, then the United States is the largest producer in the world. The United States has been at the forefront of natural resource extraction shale gas, particularly at sites in North Dakota and Texas, and this has been instrumental in increasing the country’s domestic power source production.
Oil is a precarious market, and it is always possible that another country will overtake both Saudi Arabia and the United States as the largest international oil producer. There are a large number of untapped resources in Iraq, but discovery and refinement are currently hampered due to terrorist activity and civil unrest. Also, there are huge amounts of oil in African countries, such as Libya and Nigeria, which are also underdeveloped due to political upheavals and other problems.
There are also untapped resources in Northern Siberia, a Russian territory. Russia is currently the third largest oil producer in the world, and so it is quite possible that the country presents a challenge in the future as a leading oil producer.