Estimated Oil Reserves, Selected OPEC Countries, 1980-1991 (billions of barrels)

The reserves of several OPEC countries surged during the 1980s. What is unusual about this surge is that it was sudden, dramatic, without the discovery of any significant oil fields and taking place in a context of declining oil prices. For instance, the reserves of Iraq doubled in one year (1988), from 47 to 100 billion barrels while Saudi Arabia "discovered" 88 billion barrels of new reserves in 1990, the equivalent of the Kuwaiti reserves (which surged by 26 billion barrels in 1985). The main rationale behind these inflated reserve figures was attempts at increasing oil exports which are a function of reported reserves.