MENA Countries With Oil Reserves

By Emelie Jimenez

Global awareness of climate change has motivated consumers and governments to get more serious about renouncing oil production and shifting over to sustainable sources of energy. As a result, investors have begun casting their bets on renewables and governments such as China have declared renewable energy an essential national security issue. Oil production will soon surpass demand, prices will fall and economies will be broken. The MENA region, deeply entrenched in both the climate crisis and heavily dependent on oil, is front and center in the conversation. The region accounts for 30% of global oil production and revenues stimulate regional governments by producing a labor force. With that being said, the region is still desperately water-poor with drought pushing farmers out of their lands, rising sea levels threatening cities, and increasing humidity that puts the likelihood of human survival at severe risk.

It is no secret that the economic dependency on oil has created an unequal power imbalance in the region creating the divide from oil-rich countries to oil-poor countries. Countries that are considered to be 'oil-dry' do not produce crude oil and do not have a source of production and export of oil. To fully understand how the countries in the region are truly related to each other and to the world's oil production, it's important to know which countries do not have oil reserves.

Moreover, to understand the severity of which economies will be affected and how this impact can potentially shock the region as a whole, it's important to know which countries have oil reserves, how much oil is produced, and their importance to the global economy.