Abu Dhabi: The UAE's oil would last 92 years at current production levels, latest estimates of global energy major, BP, show.
The 2008 BP Statistical Review of World Energy said the UAE's proven oil reserves of 97.8 billion barrels make up 7.9 per cent of the world's total reserves.
Officials at the UAE's Ministry of Energy were not immediately available for comment.
The UAE's crude oil output on average rose 1.53 per cent to 2.66 million barrels per day (bpd) for the quarter ended June as compared with the January-March quarter, latest data by the International Energy Agency (IEA) show.
"The non-Opec oil production is decreasing. As this happens, more and more of the world's oil requirements would be Opec sourced - particularly Gulf. This should be good news as long as prices don't get very much higher than the current levels," Dalton Garis, associate professor of economics at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi, told Gulf News.
"The higher the price of oil, the greater the political will and attitude adjustment on the part of oil consuming nations who are sitting on a mountain of coal to develop oil from coal," said Garis.
The Middle East's proven oil reserves stood at 755 billion barrels, or 61 per cent of the world's total, while the global proven oil reserves amounted to 1.24 trillion barrels, said BP.
The UAE's oil consumption rose 7.7 per cent on the year to 450,000 barrels per day in 2007, one of the highest growth rates in the Middle East, BP said.
