These 10 countries that are running out of oil will face serious problems down the road unless new reserves are found and tapped into.
For a while now, you can scarcely hear the term peak oil, which was widely used in the past to describe the end of the cheap oil era. For a while, it seemed that we are running out of oil, with the price exceeding $100 per barrel. But then United States shoal revolution got into the high gear, and prices came tumbling down, falling for a while below $40 threshold. For many oil producers, this is hardly enough to keep operating, and for many oil producing countries, especially those in OPEC, low oil prices are creating havoc in governments’ budgets. Still, any call for decreased production in order to bump up the price within the organization has been met with a resolute no from Saudi Arabia, a key player on the market. Determined to force US shoal oil producers into extinction by flooding the market with their oil, Riyadh is confident that it can weather the storm of fiscal deficit. Other countries aren’t that eager to test their limits, especially Russia, but there’s little they can do.
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Current low prices are driving the consumption through the roof, and countries like China and India are yet to reach their peak consumption. Both of these countries are still using far less oil per capita than Western countries, but the gap is getting smaller every year. With their limited reserves and production, they are heavily dependent on imported oil and will be even more so in the future. The current paradox of increased demand and falling prices can’t hold for much longer, and when the market corrects itself, there will be some serious consequences, especially for countries that are running out of oil.
In order to create this list of countries that are running out of oil, we used data from OPEC 2016 Annual Statistical Bulletin. For each country on the list, we supplied production, proven reserves, estimated time frame when they will run out of oil and imports. Interestingly enough, even some of the countries that produce the most oil are at risk of running out of it.
