Middle East emerges major opportunity for international investors

The Middle East is currently seeing a surge in investor interest as the region houses the world’s largest oil and gas reserves.

The Middle East and North African (MENA) region has been heavily exploited since 2003, with production rates increasing to meet the continued demand in oil and gas. Douglas Westwood Limited, which conducts market surveys, research and analysis, said that oil prices have increased rapidly in recent years at a gradual and sustained rate, rather than experiencing oil price “spikes” which are caused by geopolitical tension or temporary service disruption. The gradual price increase is said to be caused by the lack of extra production capacity in the oil producing MENA regions. Thus, high oil prices with increasing price volatility are increasingly considered the norm. Other large exporters of oil in the world include Russia and West Africa, However these two regions only produce a total of 50 percent of MENA production outputs. Offshore oil production has grown by 16 percent to nearly 900,000 barrels per day since 2000, but this is small compared with the 290 percent increase in gas production in the region to 1.4 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (boe/d).
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