It certainly surprised me that it is Venezuela that has the biggest oil reserves in the world and not the usual Middle East suspects of Saudi Arabia, Iran and the like.
Apart from having a bit of fun with drawing maps according to the relative size of their oil reserves rather than the size of their landmass - the above map reveals something important about how the world works.
Run By Dicatators
Most importantly of course, is the fact that almost all of the significant oil reserves in the world are held beneath the ground of countries led by dictators and authoritarian regimes.
As ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index - the top 3 oil countries are all listed as having "Authoritarian" governments. And of the top 10 oil countries - 8 are all listed as being run by "Authoritarian" regimes.
It is also probably no coincidence that we have been at war with or involved in military action with at least 5 of the top 10 oil countries.
Removing our reliance on oil, isn't just an environmental issue, it is one which may well save lives by reducing the military conflicts we get involved with.
A Very Different Picture
The above map draws countries according to the size of their oil reserves. This is therefore a map about oil potential - what oil a country could produce or access, if it wanted. However, a very different map could be drawn if we looked at what they actually produced.
For instance, in the above map, the USA is 1/6th the size of Venezuela, because it doesn't have very big oil reserves of its own. However the USA exploits its reserves much more intensively than most other countries, producing 31 times the mount of oil produced by Venezuela. In fact, were we to draw a map based on the amount of oil actually produced, rather than oil in its reserves, the USA would be the biggest country in the world, outstripping that star of the oil red carpet, Saudi Arabia. Whereas, Saudi Arabia extracts 10.8 million barrels of oil per day, the USA produces 19 million barrels per day (2022)
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