The EIA publishes Annually a list of World Proved Reserves of Crude Oil. Though all charts in this post use the EIA data, BP, the IEA and virtually every other reporting agency in the world uses basically the same data. It is my contention that this data is misleading and totally meaningless. This is especially true of OPEC Middle East Reserves. However because this data is taken as gospel by the media and perhaps 90% of energy analysts in the world, this misinformation becomes a serious problem. But first let’s look at the data. It dates to 2014 in most cases but some data only goes to 2013. All data is billion barrels of reserves.