’)A decade by decade look at how the oil production worldwide has been broken down.
Who’s Producing the World’s Oil: A Global Analysis
Black gold. Crude. Gasoline. Oil is by far the world’s most precious resource. It is produced all around the world, with the most oil being produced in the United States (5.2 million barrels a day), Russia (9.3 million barrels daily) and Saudi Arabia (8.1 million barrels a day).
While OPEC-based locations (which stands for Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries) like Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are well known for their massive and costly oil production, other Non-OPEC locales, lesser known for being oil producers, contribute their fair share to the world’s oil production. These countries include:
- The United Kingdom
- Norway
- Canada
- China
Oil Produced by the Decade
Over the past 50 years, we have seen more and more oil produced. Back in the 1960s a scant 20 million barrels of oil a day were produced by only 11 countries. This increased quickly to 36.5 million barrels daily by the 1970s, and the United Arab Emirates joined the oil producing nations at this time.
As oil and gas needs boomed in the 1980s, oil production reached 49 million barrels produced daily around the world. At this point, all 14 countries that now produce oil were in the business of making oil.
The 1990s actually saw a decrease in the amount of oil produced, which was 46.5 million gallons daily. This might be attributed to vehicles being more fuel efficient and the introduction of hybrid cars on the roads.
In the 2000s, gallons per day rose slightly, back up to the 1980s levels of 49 million. By 2009, knee deep in a worldwide economic slump, production was just over 51 million gallons a day.
Clearly, our needs (and resources) for oil are diminishing. As we build better cars running on alternative fuels, our consumption of oil is plateauing, and may even decline in the next decades.
Over the decades, all oil producing countries have increased their production, thanks to demand and rising prices per barrel. Looking at the chart, it seems that production was pretty well balanced between OPEC and Non-OPEC countries, with slight favor coming from the OPEC countries.
The United States’ production has declined since the 1990s, while Venezuela and Iraq have produced more or less the same amount of oil across all decades. Mexico, China and Russia, on the other hand, have steadily increased more oil since the 1960s, due to the demand and burgeoning market worldwide.
