Mastering the Commodities Markets

Crude Oil Production

As commodities boomed, countries all around the world woke up to the reality that in many cases:

• They were either sitting on a pot of gold – except the gold was black and sulphurous – but they had ceded the rights to their oil reserves to others, or
• At the other end of the spectrum, they were chronically exposed to the price of oil and short of the natural resources that their countries needed to fuel their booming financial and population growth.

Figure 3.3 shows the major oil producers in 1990 and it can be seen that the Middle East (17 per cent), North America and Canada (11 per cent) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) (11 per cent) were the key producers, with Africa at a modest 6 per cent of the total.

Figure 3.3