This was the question asked all of this past week all over the world. Thousands of stories were filed on the topic, following speculation by a Citigroup analyst that Saudi Arabia may start importing oil by 2030.

Per capita water consumption in Saudi Arabia is 91 percent higher than the international average, according to a new report by the country’s Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC).

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has identified mining as a key investment area after oil and petrochemicals, and is spending an estimated $38 billion to develop two cities centered around mining.

It seems that the first round in the series of the ferocious battles between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the two giant oil-exporting countries, was settled in favor of the latter.

In 1983, John Pint, an American teaching English at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), was wandering around the flat, featureless desert north of Riyadh when he discovered a hole the size of a serving platter. Air was blowing out of the hole, the sign of a cave below.

Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producer in the world with a proven reserve of 264 billion barrels, could continue oil supplies for the next 80 years at the current production levels, the Kuwait-based Diplomatic Center for Strategic Studies (DCSS) said in a study.

Michael T. Klare recently gave a presentation titled “The Geopolitics of Oil: Old and New” at the Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference in Vienna, in which he speaks about how no other substance in the world is as closely aligned with geopolitics as oil is.

In a clear break from past trends, Saudi Arabia’s private sector is growing. This trend can be in part explained by the increase in bank lending to private sector.