Which Country Is the Largest Oil Producer in the World – the USA, Russia or Saudi Arabia: The Question of Measurement – What and How

: Current and past statuses and dynamics of oil production and methods of oil measurements in different countries – under different temperatures and preassures – are considered and analyzed. The author uses methods of comparative and systematic analyses, which are implemented for assessing oil production in the USA, Saudi Arabia and Russia – the world’s leading oil producers – and globally (in the world’s context) in the past, currently and in the foreseeable future (throughout 2050). Crude oil and field (crude + lease NGLs) are considered. Oil developments in the USA, Saudi Arabia and Russia are analyzed separately with their main oil fields being covered. In the past a status of the world’s largest oil producer was taken in rotation by Russia and Saudi Arabia. Before 1992 the world supremacy in oil belonged to Russia but afterwards and until 2014 – mainly to Saudi Arabia. The article mainly concludes that now (since 2014) the USA produce more oil (crude oil + field condensate) than any other country of the world, even without accounting for indigenous biofuel liquids and mostly thanks to the massive tight-oil production.


Introduction
It is widely accepted that the current top oil producers are the USA, Russia and Saudi Arabia, which produced all together in 2019 some two fifths of the world's field production of oil (that is of the global crude oil and lease conden-sate output) ( Figures  1-3), but there are some nuances… (see below).  Source: Ten largest oil producers https://www.valuewalk.com/2020/06/largest-oil-producers-2020 [2] Individually speaking, Saudi Arabia is not king of the oil production hill, for its nemesis -the country that sought to undo every production quota OPEC could come up with, is the United States. On its own, the United States produced 19.51 million barrels of oil (and other petroleum liquids) per day, besting both Saudi Arabia and Russia, and controlling 19% of the world's oil supplies ( Figure 3). Source: https://oilprice.com/Energy/ Crude-Oil [3]

Russia
At the end of 2016, according to the Russian statistical agency (Roskomstat), the country once again became the world's largest oil producer, having outstripped in December Saudi Arabia (10.509 mln b/d compared with 10.424 mln b/d in November vs. 10.474 and 10.623 mln b/d in Saudi Arabia) [5] (see also Table 3).

Current Status
As per the well-informed US Energy Information Administration (EIA/DoE), Russia's production of crude oil + lease condensate was on the average (in kb/d) as follows: in 2015 -10,551, in 2016 -10,580, in 2017 -10,759 and in 2018 -10,847 [6].

A Bit of History
Talking about the history, Russia's oil production reached its peak in 1987 (11,416 mln b/d of field oil, according to BP) before a great dip of the 90s, caused by total disorganization of the industry (and the national economy), -down to less than 6 mln b/d in the second half of the 90s ( Figure 6). Source: Russian crude oil production https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Russia#/media/File: Russia_Oil_Production [9]. It is noteworthy that remaining oil reserves of Russia are considered hard-to-recover ones and are located quite unevenly. In 2019, up to 80% of Russia's reco-verable oil reserves was associated with operating oil fields while a share of hard-to-recover oil reserves was estimated by Russia's Minprirody at 60% [10]. Most of oil reserves is concentrated at 11 unique (≥ 300 mln tonnes per Russian classification) and 179 large (≥ 30 mln tonnes of recoverable oil) fields of mainly the Khanty-Mansi autonomous okrug (KhMAO), in the Western Siberia, which contain as a total some 70% of reserves and account for two thirds of oil production in the country [11].
Russian oil production was growing despite Russia participated in the so-called OPEC + deal. It is well known that, in December 2016, 24 oil producers (13 OPEC members and 11 non-member countries) had struck a deal to withdraw from the world oil market since the start of 2017 1.8 mln b/d of their combind oil production (compared with October 2016) to buoy up the declining world oil prices. Russia pled-ged to cut its oil production by 300 kb/d (but I wonder which Russian profitably oil-producing company was about to do it as it was the promise of the Russian officials who -by law -have no right to regulate an entity's output… Neither it would be possible to command any decrease in national oil production as the oil industry in Russia is currently almost entirely privatized …) while Saudi Arabia -the leading cutter -obliged to reduce its national oil production by 486 kb/d. The accord was extended several times and its terms were changed depending on the market's status. In particular, it was decided until the end of 2019 to decrease the collective oil production by 1.2 mln b/d (compared with October 2018) while the combined cut in the first quarter of 2020 was set at 1.7 mln b/d.
In December 2019, Russia managed to exclude gas condensate from the agreement's all national pleges to make them in line with the OPEC quotas. As a result, at the end of 2019, the RF should lower its oil output by from a new basic level of 10.626 mln b/d (instead of 11.421 mln b/d of crude and field condensate) while in the 1Q of 2020 -only by 300 kb/d [12]. Moreover, the practical difficulty lies in the fact that neiter the Roscomstat, the Russian statistical state agency, nor the CDU TEK, the RF Minenergo's official information service, report Russian oil production excluding condensate… Furthermore, at least since the beginning of 2020, the RF Minenergo started to falsify Russian oil production data to make them more consistent with the OPEC + pledge.

Saudi Arabia
With its some 260+ remaining known oil reserves is the world's largest holder of conventional oil and can keep production at 12 mln b/d until at least 2033.
As for the kingdom's quarterly field oil production, it, according to the US EIA/DoE, has gone down from 9,884 mln b/d in the last quarter of 2019 to 8,821 mln b/d in the 3Q of 2020 (Figure 7). Source: https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-otherliquids/quarterly-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production/SA Q [14] According to the London-based CEIC Data services, Saudi Arabia's produc-tion of crude oil (that is excluding condensate or other field NGLs) in November 2020 was only 8.963 kb/d ( Figure 8).
Source: https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/crude-oil-production/saudi-arabia [15]  As it is known, Saudi Arabia restricts and curtails its oil output under actually self-imposed national production quotas and as an active participant of the OPEC+ deal (see above).
Saudi oil production peaked in 2016 (at nearly 12.41 mln b/d, according to BP), ranking 2nd in the world, and was annually lowering since. Saudi Arabia: The Question of Measurement -What and How

Main Fields
Current Saudi production comes mostly from five giant but aging and fast-depleting oilfields (Ghawar, Safaniya, Hanifa, Khurais and Zuluf), all of which are more than 70 years old and are being kept producing by a huge injection of water. They have over the years accounted for more than 90% of Saudi oil production with the Ghawar field providing some half of the total [3]. Ghawar, in the Eastern Province, is the largest conventional oil field in the world located at 280 km × 30 km. It was discove-red in 1948, started production in 1951, and is owned and operated by Saudi Aramco. Some sources claim that the Ghawar peaked in 2005, though this is denied by the field ope-rators. The field holds estimated 170 billion barrels of original oil in place (OOIP), with some 140 bln bbl being regarded as recoverable [16].

Production Capacity
Saudi Arabia has the world's largest spare capacity in oil production and used to utilize it for being a swing oil producer within the OPEC (as well as globally) ( Table 2).

Outlook
The future of the kingdom's oil production is, however, quite gloomy, which is felt even now. Due to natural depletion of discovered oil fields and the recent lack of major discoveries in the country, its oil output goes down, which is especially the case for the foreseeable future. Unsurprisingly,  Back in the beginning of 2020, there were quite difficult negotiations on production cuts between Saudi Arabia and Russia within the OPEC+ deal (see above), which were immediately labeled by Western journalists as the price war. In fact, there was no war as such, simply Russian officials did not agree with initially recommended cuts (and the deal was crucially at stake) but the impasse had ended in April 2020 and the OPEC + agreement was extended further, with the pleged cuts of nearly 10 mln b/d [19]. As a result, average spot price of Brent blend and of Dubai and WTI crudes has gone up from some $3/bbl at end-April and got stabilezed at around $40/bbl in the 3Q of 2020 ( Figure 12).  Saudi Arabia's economy relies heavily on petroleum. According to the Forbes magazine, petroleum accounts for roughly 87 percent of the country's budget reve-nues, 32 percent of GDP, and 81 percent of export earnings [21]. A look at the dis-tribution of global oil reserves by country shows that only Venezuela possesses a higher share in global oil reserves than this Arab state [22].

USA
In October 2018, thanks to aggressively growing "shaleoil" (tight-oil) production, the country, which produced in that month as a total 11,554 kb/d of crude oil and lease condensate, according to the EIA [23], has become the world's largest oil producer, having overtaken this world supremacy status from Russia (see also Table 3).

Where
The largest oil-producing fields (forma-tions) in the USA include the Permian in Texas and in New Mexico, the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas, and the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana, Prudhoe Bay field in northern Alaska (by the way, the largest oil field in both the United States and North America, discovered in 1967 and located at 213,543 acres), the Wattenberg Field in Colorado (producing both gas and oil), the Shenzi field in the Gulf of Mexico, the Kuparuk River field in northern Alaska, west of the Prudhoe Bay, the Midway-Sunset oil field in California, the Atlantis oil field in the Gulf of Mexico, and Sugarkane field in Texas (Figure 14).  All in all, 100 top oil fields/formations account for over 55% of the country's proved oil reserves (more than 26.5 bln bbl out of 47.1 bln bbl at the end of 2018) and nearly half of its oil production [23].

Prospects
As per the EIA, average field oil production in the USA actually was (in kb/d) 12,781 in 2015, 8,852 in 2016, 9,371 in 2017, 10,964 in 2018 and 12,248 in 2019 [25] and was predicted at the very end of 2020 -under a reference scenario -to go slightly down by 2050 to 11.96 mln b/d. Included was the tight-oil production, which was 7.99 mln b/d (65% of the total) in 2019 and 8.74 mln b/d (73%) in 2050 [26].
Within its near-term forecast, EIA expects U.S. field crude oil production to fall from the average 12. Moreover, the estimated pandemic-driven 0.8 million bpd year-over-year out-put fall in 2021 is the largest annual decline in US crude oil production on record, the EIA says [28].
At any rate, "shale-oil" (tight-oil) production was instrumental in rising US total oil output up to and over 10 mln b/d -while conventional oil production was rougfly stable -at around 4,000-5,000 kb/d, -tight-oil one was dramatically increasing with only inconsiderable decrease during an obvious fall of domestic oil prices in 2014-2016 ( Figure 16).

What Should Be Noted
It is important not to overlook the fact that available oil production data usually relate to the production of crude oil + lease (or mixed/field) condensate.
Bearing in mind the differencies in measuring oil volumes at standard tempera-ture and pressure (or, shortly, STP), which are currently accepted in Russia and the USA (and actually worldwide, excluding Russia and some major buyers of Russian crude), it noteworthy that in order of bringing the Russian oil volumes (traditional-ly and officially measured at 20°C and 760 mmHg) to the US conditions (60°F and and 14.696 psia) one needs to decrease the Russian volume by 1.54% ( Figure 17) [30].

Who Is the Leader
All in all, if we consider a period since the middle of the 80s, when oil production data for Russia started to be published, and typical field oil production data (that of crude oil + lease condensate), the world's largest oil producer varied as follows: until 1992 it was Russia, then until 2009 a status of the biggest oil-producing country was surely held by Saudi Arabia, then again -for a short time, until 2011 -it was overtaken by Russia, in 2011 Saudi Arabia anew though shortly has acquired the status of the world's oil leader, in 2016 this status has moved from the USA for two years only back to Russia and finally since 2018 the USA have become the world's largest oil producer -thanks to their fast-growing tight-oil pro-duction -for how long?.. (Table 3).

No NGL
However, if we consider only crude oil (that is exclude lease/field condensate or any other NGLs, a lot of which is produced in Russia -on the average, some 0.75 mb/d in the recent years or around 7% of its total oil output -and in the USA -5.4 mb/d (0.44%) in 2019) [23], some differencies in the world's supremacy in 1985, 1991, 2014-2015 and 2018 occur but they, though important for those years, do not considerably change the general picture ( Figure 19).   Table 3, https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/crude-oil-production/saudi-arabia [15], https://www.eia. gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1/2&f [23]

Outlooks Thoughout 2050
In line with the last annual report of the interna-tional peak-oil organization (ASPO), the 3 top oil producing countries will produce by 2050 slightly less of their oil ( Figure 20).

USA
According to the last long-term forecast (the beginning of 2021) of the Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy (EIA/ DoE), field oil production in the country must decrease by 2050, under a reference scenario, from a maximum of more than 14 mln b/d in 2027-2035 to a bit less than 12 mln b/d ( Figure 21). Source: Saudi Arabia Eyes Total Dominance In Oil https://oilprice.com/Energy/ Crude-Oil [3]

Russia
As for Russia's long-term prospects, the Moscow-based Energy Research Institute of The Russian Academy of Sciences (ERI RAS) predicts oil pro-duction by 2040 in its basic scenario the following way ( Figure 22 In its turn, the all-knowing EIA predicts, however, that Russian annual field oil production must go up by 2050 from less than 11 mb/d to more than 13 mb/d and Russia must overtake the USA in this respect (Figure 23).

Saudi Arabia
Based on the ASPO estimates, the Saudi oil production is projected to peak in 2030 at 606 million tonnes and to lessen to around 500 mln t per year by the middle of this century ( Figure 24).

Conclusion
So, based on the above considerations, and if all field NGLs are included, currently, since 2019, the world's largest oil producer is the USA, fol-lowed by Saudi Arabia and Russia, and this is unlikely to change in near future.