US holds more oil reserves than Russia, Saudi Arabia: Report

An oil storage tank and crude oil pipeline equipment is seen during a tour by the Department of Energy at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Freeport, Texas, June 9, 2016. (Reuters photo)

The United States holds more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia and Russia largely due to its shale oil, according to a new report.
The US currently holds an estimated 264 billion of barrels of reserves, compared with 256 billion barrels for Russia and 212 billion barrels for Saudi Arabia., Norwegian consultancy Rystad Energy said in a report.
That recoverable oil reserves are in existing fields, discoveries and yet to be discovered fields, according to Rystad.
The report said more than 50 percent of remaining oil reserves in the US are unconventional shale oil. According to the data, the state of Texas alone holds more than 60 billion barrels of shale oil.
Rystad estimated total global oil reserves at 2092 billion barrels, which would last only 70 years at the current production level of 30 billion barrels of crude oil per year.
Offshore production accounts for 33 percent of the global recoverable oil reserves while unconventional oil recovery accounts for 30 percent of the total.
Crude prices recently rebounded from their January lows of under $30, and in May briefly pushed past $50 a barrel for the first time this year as the market gained support from production outages in Canada and Nigeria.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has released a report in June saying the world’s crude oil production has decreased for the first time since 2013.
The report said reductions by OPEC and non-OPEC countries led to cuts in global oil supply by nearly 800,000 barrels per day (bpd) in May. It said the current output stood at over 95 million bpd.
The IEA said the drop comes despite Iran’s fast return to the OPEC oil market with an anticipated gain of 700,000 bpd.