The Top 25 – Global Oil Production By Country

We have seen gasoline prices plummet to as low as USD$1.29/gallon in the United States and CDN$0.58/liter in Canada.  We knew that:

1. the United States became the worlds largest producer of oil a few years ago thanks largely to the fracking revolution, and
2. Russia and Saudi Arabia were quickly expanding production

but we didn’t really have a grasp on scale. How big is the global oil market and where major oil producing countries like Canada, Iraq, Mexico and Venezuela lie in the great oil bed?  This turned out to be a much trickier question to answer than you might think.

As we explained in our article Why Is Gas So Cheap Right Now? … and it isn’t Because of COVID-19 the real issue is an over production by Russia and Saudi Arabia as they aggressively fight for dominance.  So the numbers are both changing rapidly and often fictionalized by a countries official reporting to serve their own ends.

There are many proxies to estimate the real amount of oil that is being produced, like tanker shipments, satellite imagery analysis, and verifiable purchases so we started with January 2020 data from TradingEconomics.com and then updated it with March / April 2020 data from other reliable sources like Bloomberg, the IEA and the Canadian Energy Regulator to develop this chart.

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INTERESTING NOTES:

• Global oil production is estimated (as explained it is impossible to get an exact “true” number) to be just over 100 million barrels of oil per day as of March 2020.  The true number on any given day is + or – 5 million barrels.  This nice round number also allows us to generalize the the numbers you see in the chart above is the percentage of oil produced globally.   For instance, we can say that Canada produces about 5% of the worlds oil because it produces 4.87 million barrels of oil per day.  We can also say that this top 25 list, represents about 80% of global oil production, because it totals to 79 million barrels of oil per day.
• The IEA says:  SOURCE
  • “…global oil demand could decline by 730,000 barrels per day in 2020” or “…global oil demand could grow by 480,000 barrels per day in 2020”
  • “For 2020 as a whole, the magnitude of the drop in the first half leads to a decline in global oil demand of around 90,000 barrels per day, the first annual fall since 2009.”
• Bloomberg Noted “It is not clear how much of Russia’s production increase will result in higher exports. Before Russia entered the price war it intended to export around 1.85 million barrels a day by sea in March, less than the 2 million barrels a day it shipped in February.” SOURCE