Saudi overtakes Russia as top crude producer
Saudi Arabia has edged ahead of Russia in being the world’s biggest crude oil producer for the first time since 2006, official data showed yesterday.
Figures collected by the Joint Organisations Data Initiative (JODI), whose inputs include data from Eurostat, the IEA, the UN and OPEC, show the Middle Eastern state producing 9.923m barrels per day in March, versus Russia’s 9.920m.
The changeover follows three months of production under 10m for Russia. Before January of this year it had been pumping out an average of over 10m barrels a day, which President Vladmir Putin has said is a target amount, for two years straight.
Saudi, by contrast, has failed to average such a large daily amount for several decades. But the country is by a large margin the largest oil exporter.
The figures also show that global crude oil production has been slipping slightly in the last few months: it went down to 57m barrels per day in March and was under 60m for three of the last five months.
By contrast, production has otherwise been over 60m barrels a day every month since February 2003.