Fact check: US was world’s top oil producer in 2018, followed by Russia, Saudi Arabia

Chris Mueller, USA TODAY
·4 min read
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The claim: Texas was the largest oil producer in the world in 2018, surpassing Saudi Arabia

Texas churned out 1.7 billion barrels of oil in 2021, by far the most of any state in the U.S.

But a widely viewed Facebook post claims Texas was at one point in time the world’s largest oil producer, outperforming even oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

“On this day, in 2018 Texas was the largest oil producer in the world, surpassing Saudi Arabia,” reads the Oct. 5 post, which was shared more than 4,500 times in six days.

But the claim is false for a few reasons.

Texas produced about 1.6 billion barrels of oil in 2018, according to The Railroad Commission of Texas, which is the state agency that oversees the oil and natural gas industry. Saudi Arabia, though, produced more than twice that, turning out more than 3.7 billion barrels for the year.

The U.S. as a whole – not Texas alone – became the world’s largest oil producer in 2018, outproducing Russia and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. still holds the top spot and accounted for 14.5% of crude oil production worldwide last year, compared to 13.1% for Russia and 12.1% for Saudi Arabia, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment.

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Texas produces less oil than Russia, Saudi Arabia

By any measure, Texas was not the "largest oil producer in the world" in 2018, as the claim states.

Texas was producing about 4.7 million barrels of oil a day in October 2018 – the time period referenced in the post. But that's less than half of what Saudi Arabia produced at the time, according to the Energy Information Administration.

There is no publicly available data on oil production for specific days, but it's unlikely Texas ever topped Saudi Arabia "unless that day was somehow extraordinary," said Ted Kury, director of energy studies for the University of Florida's Public Utility Research Center.

"Regardless, one day doesn’t matter much in oil production," he said.

And to become the world's largest oil producer at the time, Texas would have needed to do more than surpass Saudi Arabia. It would have also had to beat out Russia, which was producing about 10.8 million barrels a day in 2018.

"Even if Saudi Arabia had a bad day, Texas was still likely behind Russia," Kury said.

Fact check: False claim that Permian Basin oil supply would fuel America for 200 years

Texas, though, has played a significant role in making the U.S. as a whole the world's largest oil producer, a title the country has held since 2018. The amount of oil produced in the U.S. increased almost every year between 2009 and 2019, fueled by more cost-effective drilling technology in Texas, but also in North Dakota, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Colorado, the Energy Information Administration says.

There is an oil-producing area in Texas that may be the most productive in the world, though.

The Permian Basin, a large swath of land in Texas and New Mexico, was producing more than 3.8 million barrels a day for the first time by the end of 2018, according to a Journal of Petroleum Technology report.

That figure had increased to 4.1 million barrels a day by early 2019, which, the report says, "has led some to declare that the Permian has overtaken (Saudi Arabia's Ghawar oil field) as 'the world's top oil producer.'"

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that Texas was the largest oil producer in the world in 2018, surpassing Saudi Arabia. Texas produced about 1.6 billion barrels of oil in 2018, which is less than what Russia and Saudi Arabia turned out that year. However, the U.S. overall was the world’s largest oil producer in 2018, a title the country has held ever since.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: US was world’s top oil producer in 2018, not Texas alone