Oil reserves

Proven reserves
Proven reserves are those reserves claimed to have a reasonable certainty (normally at least 90% confidence) of being recoverable under existing economic and political conditions, with existing technology. Industry specialists refer to this as P90 (i.e., having a 90% certainty of being produced). Proven reserves are also known in the industry as 1P

Most of the world's oil reserves are in the Middle East

 Geographically, Middle-East & North African countries, i.e. Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi-Arabia etc. remains the largest hub for crude oil resource. With this regard, the governments of oil supplying countries of Middle-East and North Africa had formed a coalition of Organization of Petrol Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1961 in order to create a monopolistic environment in global oil supplies.

 This organization enabled the OPEC members to control the global oil prices as per their interest through supply volume manipulation. In fact, the formation of OPEC group has always been disadvantageous for Oil importing countries like America and Europe.

 The top 5 countries with proven oil reserves: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait. The top 5 countries with proven natural gas reserves: Russia, Iran, Qatar, Turkmenistan and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. is the worlds largest consumer of crude oil using 19,148,000 barrels/day or 378 million gallons/day for motor gasoline. Canada is the largest supplier of crude oil to the US at 1,972,000 barrels/da

OPEC( Organization of petroleum exporting countries)

OPEC is a permanent, intergovernmental organization, established in Baghdad ,Iraq , 1014 September 1960. The Organization comprises 12 Members: Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela. The Organization has its headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

 Its objective is to coordinate and unify petroleum policies among Member Countries, in order to secure a steady income to the producing countries; an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consuming nations; and a fair return on capital to those investing in the petroleum industry.

Between 1986 and 2003, the annual average real price of crude oil remained below $41 per barrel. Between 2003 and 2008, however, oil prices increased by 23% on an average annual basis (measure din real dollars). The NYMEX prompt month futures price of light sweet crude oil peaked above $145 per barrel in the first half of July 2008.2 This surge in crude oil prices, accompanied by gasoline prices that rose to over $4 per gallon, prompted extensive public discussion and investigations by Congress and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Various participants in the public debate cast a number of entities (including speculators, OPEC, and large oil companies) as culprits responsible for the oil and gasoline price increases. Others pointed to the role of fundamen tal supply and demand factors as drivers of oil price movements. These factors included (1) the constraints on access to resources, (2) the continuing depletion of lower-cost resources, (3) the increased cost of developing new resources, (4) increasing demand driven by economic growth, an d (5) government price subsidies. In addition, there was some discussion of market reactions to geopolitical risks.

 classified news events into the following categories: poli tical events, economic events, natural events ( weather related events), and other events

 Within each of these categories are subcategories. We classified political events into the following subcategories: OPEC decisions an d announcements, Federal Reserve Board (or other central bank) decisions and announcement s,7 and acts or threats of violence (such as terrorism or war) that threaten oilproducing regions or countries, including the Middle East, Nigeria, and Venezuela. We classified economic events into the follo wing subcategories: news about the economy, news about oil inventory levels, and news about finan cial trading (or speculation). The only natural events that occurred in the short day-today time frame of our analysis were weather-related events.

oil
Dated Brent averaged $111.26 per barrel in 2011, an increase of 40% from the 2010 level. The loss of Libyan supplies early in the year, combined with smaller disruptions in a number of other countries, pushe d prices sharply higher despite a large increase in production among other OPEC members following the Libyan outages and a release of strategic stocks from Int ernational Energy Agency member countries.