Oil production by country

Read on for a look at the 10 top oil producing countries, including the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Canada. The top 10 countries combined for 74.59 million bpd out of the total global output of 101.81 bpd in 2023.

Statistics are from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and include total production of petroleum and other liquids. It is the most current data at the time of publication.

1. United States

Production: 21.91 million barrels per day (includes crude oil and liquids)

The US is the largest oil-producing country in the world, with output of 21.91 million barrels per day in 2023, taking the spot for the sixth year in a row. The US has been described as a swing producer because its production fluctuates alongside market prices. Texas leads the way as the biggest oil-producing state in the nation, with output more than three times as high as the second biggest oil-producing state, New Mexico.

In addition to being the largest oil producer in the world, the US is a big consumer of oil. In 2023, the US consumed an average of 20.5 million barrels per day of petroleum products.

In its October 2024 Short Term Energy Outlook, the EIA has forecasted that US crude oil output, including lease condensate, will average 13.22 million barrels per day in 2024 and 13.54 million barrels per day in 2025.

2. Saudi Arabia

Production: 11.13 million barrels per day (includes natural gas liquids)

Saudi Arabia’s oil output came in at 11.13 million bpd in 2023. The country possesses 17 percent of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and is the largest petroleum exporter. Its oil and gas sector accounts for around 50 percent of its gross domestic product and about 85 percent of its export earnings.

Saudi Arabia plays a key role in OPEC’s decisions to curb oil output in recent years. In 2022, the country’s US relations soured to the point that the country was unwilling to increase production in an effort to bring down rising gasoline prices.

The Associated Press notes that ‘the Saudis need higher oil prices to fund ambitious plans by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to diversify the country’s economy away from fossil fuel exports.’

However, there are signs that Saudi Arabia’s leader may be inclined to break with OPEC and increase its oil production. Some analysts are suggesting that the Crown Prince may be willing to deal with the economic pain of lower oil prices if it translates into a greater market share.

3. Russia

Production: 10.75 million barrels per day (includes natural gas liquids)

Prior to production cuts in 2020, Russian oil output had spent a number of years rising; it came in at 10.75 million bpd in 2023. Most of Russia’s reserves are located in West Siberia, between the Ural Mountains and the Central Siberian Plateau, as well as in the Urals-Volga region, extending into the Caspian Sea. As a member of OPEC, Russia is also curbing its production in 2024.

In response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, Canada, the US, the UK and Australia have banned imports of Russian oil, representing about 13 percent of Russia’s exports. In March 2022, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned that Russia could be forced to cut 30 percent of its crude oil production, resulting in a serious global oil supply crisis. “The implications of a potential loss of Russian oil exports to global markets cannot be understated,” the IEA said at the time.

However, it seems that in 2023 Russia’s oil exports rebounded to pre-war levels as early as April with heavy demand from China and India.

Ukraine’s recent tactic of striking Russia’s key oil refineries as a part of its defense strategy has reportedly impacted 17 percent of Russia’s oil refinery capacity as of July 2024.

4. Canada

Production: 5.76 million barrels per day

Next on this list of the top 10 oil-producing nations is Canada. The country’s annual oil production rose by about 10,000 bpd from the previous year to 5.76 million bpd in 2023.

Nearly all of Canada’s proven oil reserves are located in Alberta, and according to the province’s government, 97 percent of oil reserves there are in the form of oil sands. The vast majority of Canada’s total energy exports are to the USA. In fact, in 2023, 60 percent of US crude imports originated from Canada compared to 33 percent in 2013.

However, because of economic and political considerations, Canada is developing ways to diversify its trading partners, especially by expanding ties with emerging markets in Asia. For this year, all eyes are on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion in Western Canada, which was finally completed and operational as of May 1.

5. China

Production: 5.26 million barrels per day

China’s annual oil output was 5.26 million bpd in 2023. The nation is the world’s second largest consumer of oil and moved from being the second largest net importer of oil to the largest in 2014.

China is the world’s most populous country and has a rapidly growing economy, factors that have driven its high overall energy demand. The Asian country is the top consumer of oil, with the majority its imports coming from OPEC member countries Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Unsurprisingly, Chinese demand can strongly influence the oil market.

However its oil production in 2024 is in decline. As of September, China’s oil refinery output fell for the sixth straight month, reported Reuters.

Recent new discoveries look difficult to develop at the same time that production out of mature fields is falling. However, in early July the Chinese government announced the establishment of a new state-controlled body to coordinate collaboration between national oil producers and other state entities to extract harder to reach oil and gas reserves and more difficult non-conventional sources, reported Reuters.

6. Iraq

Production: 4.42 million barrels per day

Still the second-largest oil producer in OPEC, Iraq’s annual oil production declined from 4.55 million bpd in 2022 to 4.42 million bpd for 2023.

Iraq holds 145.02 billion barrels of proven oil reserves based on 2023 OPEC data, representing 11.7 percent of global reserves. The nation’s capacity to boost production has been constrained by infrastructure and export bottlenecks. Reuters reported in early August that the Iraqi government and energy giant BP (LSE:BP,NYSE:BP) have signed a preliminary agreement to develop four oil and gas fields in the country’s northern Kirkuk region.

7. Brazil

Production: 4.28 million barrels per day

According to the IEA, total primary energy consumption in Brazil has nearly doubled in the past decade due to sustained economic growth. The largest share of Brazil’s total energy consumption is oil and other liquid fuels, followed by hydroelectricity and natural gas.

Brazil is reportedly on track to become the world’s fourth largest oil producer in the coming years. In 2024, the country’s oil output is expected to contribute significantly to global oil supply growth. The country’s top oil producer, Petrobras, is making efforts to squeeze ‘every last drop of oil from its existing fields,’ while searching for new deposits, reports Oilprice.com

8. United Arab Emirates

Production: 4.16 million barrels per day

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is another OPEC member and has ranked among the world’s top 10 oil-producing countries for decades. In 2023, it saw a slight drop in production on OPEC production cuts.

The country has proven oil reserves of 111 billion barrels, with most of those reserves located in Abu Dhabi. The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company upped its crude oil output to 4.85 million bpd in early May, 2024 and has a planned target of 5 million bpd by 2027.

The National Bank of Kuwait is forecasting that the UAE’s oil production will increase by 7.8 percent next year to reach 3.4 million barrels per day by the end of 2025.

9. Iran

Production: 3.99 million barrels per day

Iran ranks ninth in the world for oil production, and its oil output grew from 3.66 million bpd in 2022 to 3.99 million barrels per day in 2023. According to the EIA, Iran holds the world’s third largest proven oil reserves, as well as the world’s second largest natural gas reserves. The majority of its 1.3 million bpd in oil exports last year went to Asia.

US sanctions and regional disputes have all weighed on Iran’s energy production sector. Despite its abundant reserves, Iran’s oil production is still far below the 4.78 million bpd the country produced back in 2017. However, in May 2024 Iran’s crude oil and gas condensate exports reportedly reached 1.7 million barrels per day, representing a 5-year high.

As of October 2024, there are slight concerns a wider escalation of its ongoing conflict with Israel could lead to attacks on Iran’s oil infrastructure. The US recently imposed further sanctions on Iran in response to its attacks on Israel.

10. Kuwait

Production: 2.91 million barrels per day

Last on this list of the top 10 oil-producing countries is Kuwait, which has struggled in recent years to bring its oil output back up to 3.5 million bpd. Economy Middle East reports that key infrastructure projects have been delayed by internal political strife.

Kuwait’s oil and gas sector accounts for about 50 percent of the country’s GDP, and an even larger share of its export revenues at around 90 percent. New oil discoveries have given the country hope of increasing its oil output in the coming years. As of October 2024, Kuwait is reportedly preparing to open bidding for oil field development projects.

FAQs for oil investing

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What is AlphaFold?

AlphaFold is an AI program that can predict protein structures by analyzing massive databases of known protein shapes and their corresponding amino acid sequences. It was trained and developed on Google’s supercomputers.

AlphaFold 2, the second iteration of the program, is accessible via its open-source code and a public database of protein structure predictions, enabling researchers to access pre-computed structures. Researchers can also download the program and run their own experiments.

DeepMind released AlphaFold 3 in May 2024 with limited access, with some capabilities accessible through the AlphaFold Server. Full access to the model is expected eventually, but no release date has been set.

What is DeepMind?

Inspired by neuroscience, DeepMind is a startup specializing in developing general-purpose AI. The company’s AI systems use a type of machine learning called reinforcement learning, where the AI learns through trial and error by interacting with its environment. DeepMind’s objective was to “solve intelligence, and then solve everything else.”

DeepMind was launched in London in 2010. Demis Hassabis, a British computational neuroscientist, was a co-founder of DeepMind, alongside Shane Legg, a machine learning researcher, and Mustafa Suleyman, an AI entrepreneur who left the company in 2019.

Researchers originally used games to test their programs’ learning capabilities. The company had a major breakthrough in 2013 when it developed an AI algorithm that could learn how to play Atari games just by observing the game screen, with no human input or instructions. The company’s findings were presented at the NIPS Deep Learning Workshop in December 2013.

On January 27, 2014, shortly after DeepMind published its Atari research paper, the company was acquired by Google for around US$650 million, and eventually integrated its technology into Google’s product offerings such as Google Maps and Google Assistant. In 2023, DeepMind merged with Google’s deep learning AI research team, Google Brain, to form Google DeepMind.

Google’s acquisition enabled DeepMind to scale and accelerate its research. DeepMind inked a deal with London-based Moorfields Eye Hospital in July 2016 to begin training AlphaFold to recognize signs of eye disease in medical images.

The same year, DeepMind began developing AI systems that would be able to solve the “protein folding problem,” a long-standing goal in scientific research.

In 2017, computer scientist John Jumper joined DeepMind as a research scientist who led the development of AlphaFold. Jumper’s background in computational biology made him uniquely qualified to apply machine learning to the complexities of protein folding.

The culmination of DeepMind’s effort came on October 2, 2024, when Hassabis and Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold, cementing the program’s status as a transformative tool in the scientific community.

How does AlphaFold work?

AlphaFold uses machine learning to predict the 3D structure of a protein based on its sequence of amino acids, which are like a list of ingredients that make up the protein’s chemical composition.

A protein’s amino acid sequence determines its unique shape through a process called protein folding. In turn, a protein’s shape determines its function.

When a protein folds incorrectly, it can stop functioning properly or become toxic. Protein misfolding is believed to cause neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s disease, prion diseases, as well as type II diabetes, cystic fibrosis, cataracts and certain types of cancers.

By knowing the shape of a protein, researchers can identify biomarkers for certain diseases and study how each protein interacts with other molecules, enabling them to design drugs that will bind to a target.

Before AlphaFold, biology researchers had been trying to identify the 3D shape of proteins for decades, using a number of expensive and time-consuming experiments and computations that struggled to achieve high accuracy.

Advances in genomics, such as the discovery of thousands of new genes through the Genome Project, further complicated things; each time a new gene was identified, it implied the existence of a previously unknown corresponding protein, so the number of proteins needing identification kept growing.

Once a sequence is input into AlphaFold, it combs through its database of all 200 million known protein structures to find one with a similar structure. AlphaFold’s neural network is trained on the rules of protein folding and how different amino acids interact with each other, which is a massive amount of data. Based on this information, AlphaFold makes several predictions as to the protein’s 3D structure, then refines its prediction until it finds the single most likely structure.

AlphaFold’s achievements

In 2018, DeepMind entered AlphaFold into the 13th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition, a biannual experiment founded in 1994. AlphaFold won the event, accurately predicting 25 out of 43 proteins. The team that came in second place only predicted three out of 43.

“For us, this is a really key moment,” Hassabis told The Guardian at the time. “This is a lighthouse project, our first major investment in terms of people and resources into a fundamental, very important, real-world scientific problem.”

While the first AlphaFold model was a remarkable achievement, it still had limitations. The second model, AlphaFold2, was trained on a much larger and more diverse data set. At the CASP14 competition in 2020, AlphaFold 2 demonstrated remarkable accuracy, achieving a score of 92.4 out of 100 to win the contest for a second time.

This level of precision was unlike anything the scientific community had seen before from a computational prediction method. In the July 2021 issue of Nature, DeepMind published ‘Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold,” which detailed the architecture and training methodology of AlphaFold and explored its potential applications.

The company also open-sourced AlphaFold 2’s code and created the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, allowing scientists and researchers to run their own experiments and build on AlphaFold’s capabilities.

Recognizing the immense potential of AlphaFold’s technology to revolutionize drug discovery, Hassabis founded Isomorphic Labs in November 2021, a separate company dedicated to using AI to accelerate drug discovery. Meanwhile, DeepMind continued to advance AlphaFold 2. On July 28, 2022, the AlphaFold database reached a transformative milestone with the inclusion of every cataloged protein, roughly 200 million structures.

How to invest in AlphaFold and DeepMind stock

As private companies, DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs offer limited access to public investors, but there are still ways to benefit from their success.

DeepMind is a wholly owned private subsidiary of Google’s Alphabet, meaning investing in Alphabet provides an indirect way to gain exposure to DeepMind and AlphaFold’s potential.

Similarly, investing in pharmaceutical companies that utilize AlphaFold for drug discovery can offer investors indirect exposure to Isomorphic Labs’ success.

In December 2023, Isomorphic Labs established multi-year partnerships with major pharmaceutical firms Novartis (NYSE:NVS,SWX:NOVN) and Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY). These agreements involve substantial upfront payments to Isomorphic Labs, with Novartis contributing US$37.5 million and Eli Lilly providing US$45 million.

The collaborations aim to leverage AlphaFold’s technology to expedite the design of new drug molecules and enhance the prediction of their interactions with target proteins, ultimately accelerating drug discovery processes. Together, these deals have the potential to generate over US$3 billion in revenue.

What’s next for AlphaFold?

DeepMind’s Nobel Prize win thrust AlphaFold back into the spotlight, sparking renewed interest in its potential and future development. AlphaFold 3, released in May 2024, represents a significant step forward, expanding on the technology’s capabilities beyond protein folding; AlphaFold 3 can predict the structures of protein complexes, which are groups of proteins that interact with each other.

AlphaFold 3 can also predict how proteins interact with other biomolecules like DNA, RNA and ligands, and model the effects of chemical modifications made to proteins. These improvements make AlphaFold 3 a powerful tool for understanding disease and developing new treatments.

AlphaFold has revolutionized the field of protein structure prediction, offering unprecedented accuracy and accessibility to researchers worldwide. Its impact on drug discovery and disease understanding is already evident, and the future holds even greater promise for this groundbreaking technology.

FAQs for Canadian Mining Stocks

How much does it cost to list on the TSXV?

There are a variety of different fees that companies must pay to list on the TSXV, and according to the exchange, they can vary based on the transaction’s nature and complexity. The listing fee alone will most likely cost between C$10,000 to C$70,000. Accounting and auditing fees could rack up between C$25,000 and C$100,000, while legal fees are expected to be over C$75,000 and an underwriters’ commission may hit up to 12 percent.

The exchange lists a handful of other fees and expenses companies can expect, including but not limited to security commission and transfer agency fees, investor relations costs and director and officer liability insurance.

These are all just for the initial listing, of course. There are ongoing expenses once companies are trading, such as sustaining fees and additional listing fees, plus the costs associated with filing regular reports.

How do you trade on the TSXV?

Investors can trade on the TSXV the way they would trade stocks on any exchange. This means they can use a stock broker or an individual investment account to buy and sell shares of TSXV-listed companies during the exchange’s trading hours.