Venezuela claims it has world's largest oil reserves

Venezuela has surpassed Saudi Arabia to become the nation with the largest proven crude oil reserves in the world, at 297 billion barrels, Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said Wednesday.


"At the end of 2010 we had a level of 217 billion barrels of oil, and right now at the start of this year we can certify 297 billion barrels," the minister said at a press conference.


Saudi Arabia, long the world's top producer and exporter of crude, has some 266 billion barrels of oil, according to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.


OPEC-member Venezuela, Latin America's leading exporter of crude, has claimed steadily increasing proven oil reserves in recent years including a 23-percent increase one year ago, due largely to Venezuela's oil-rich Orinoco Belt.


The region in Venezuela's southeast has seen a boon in domestic and foreign investment in recent years as Caracas seeks to exploit the Orinoco Belt's reserves of heavy and extra-heavy oil.


For years experts believed it was too expensive to extract and refine the heavy and extra-heavy oil in the area. But the increase in global oil prices -- currently around 100 dollars a barrel, against 20 dollars a barrel in the 1990s -- has revived interest among foreign firms that have pledged tens of billions of dollars in investment.


Last year some 30 companies from more than 20 different countries were operating in the Orinoco Belt, an oil reserve of some 55,314 square kilometers (21,360 square miles) in the Orinoco River area.


But the Orinoco oil has been a point of contention in the petroleum world.


Last July, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief, dismissed claims by President Hugo Chavez who said Venezuela might have more than Saudi Arabia's proven reserves.


"These claims are entirely about unproven reserves, so they are completely hypothetical and, in my opinion, entirely unfounded," the prince said at the time.

"Were Saudi Arabia to go down the path of claiming unproven reserves, there would still be no competition," he added, saying the desert kingdom might have over 700 billion barrels underground.