Countries with Large Crude Oil Reserves

Identifying countries with large crude oil reserves is important, but it's just a starting point, as you start investing in raw materials. To determine which countries are making good use of these reserves, one should look at another important metric: actual production. Having big reserves does not make sense if a country is not touching such reserves for oil production.

Rank country Daily production (millions of barrels)

1 Saudi Arabia 10.8

2 Russia 9.8

3 United States 8.5

4 Iran 4.2

5 Porcelain 4.0

6 Canada 3.4

7 Mexico 3.2

8 United Arab Emirates 3.0

9 Kuwait 2.8

10 Venezuela 2.6

Source: United States Department of Energy

A number of factors influence how many crude countries will be able to pump off day-to-day, including geopolitical stability and the application of technically advanced raw recovery techniques. It also recalls that daily production may change over the course of the year due to interruptions resulting from geopolitical events such as embargoes, sanctions and sabotage that end the daily production or other external factors such as the weather.

For example, consider Hurricane Katrina and its devastating effect on US oil supplies in the summer of 2005, as well as the Gulf BP oil spill in 2010.

You need to keep an eye close to the global daily supply because any problem in the production supply chain can have a big impact on the current crude price. Because there is a narrow supply and demand equation, any feed interruption that can send star prices to crude.

Merchant merchants follow the crude oil production numbers in the near future. Crude Benchmark Contracts, such as the West Texas Intermediate (WTI), traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and North Sea Brent, traded on the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in London, are affected by supply numbers. As a result, the market looks carefully at every geopolitical event or natural disaster that can reduce production.

If you are an active oil merchant with a future account, following these daily production numbers - which are available through the Energy Information Administration (EIA) site - is paramount. Futures markets are particularly sensitive to crude oil production per day, and any unprocessed event may have a sudden impact on oil futures contracts.

If you are a long-term investor in the markets, monitoring this issue is also important because production data may have an impact on overall stock market performance as well. For example, if rebels seize a pipeline in Nigeria and 300,000 barrels of Nigerian crude oil are withdrawn from the market, this will result in higher crude prices, which will have an impact on the US stock market (which typically fall).

Thus, your equity investments in the portfolio may be at risk due to daily production of crude oil. Therefore, monitoring this statistic regularly is important for both short-term and long-term investors.