Reserves of oil, its production, and its rising price

…For the past 30 years, the Organization of Oil Exporting countries (OPEC) has acted as a regulator of oil price, increasing production when prices got too high and reducing it to prevent the price from going too low. But demand has been rising too fast in the last two years. In 2005, the year the daily consumption reached 84.9 million barrels a day, the Saudi petroleum authorities promised to get OPEC to intervene and bring prices down. But in the end OPEC had to admit that they had too little spare capacity left to do much. The oil is there, but the infrastructure to bring it to the surface was unable to meet the increasing demands. The Saudis have undertaken to increase their own production to 12 million barrels a day from the current 10 million by 2009.

Saudi Arabia