Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil producer, expects production to average 8.7 million barrels a day from now until 2015, the country's Opec governor said. Average crude output will rise to 10.8m barrels a day by 2030 as long as supplies from other nations don't fluctuate sharply, Majid al-Moneef said in a report posted on the website of Arab Energy Club. This level of production will allow the kingdom to maintain total capacity at 12.5m barrels, he said. The country's upstream investments in recent years are sufficient "to meet both export and local demand requirements while keeping a high spare capacity reaching 1.7m barrels a day by 2030," according to the report, entitled 'Saudi Economy and the Future of Energy' published on April 18. The kingdom aims to maintain surplus production of 1.5m to 2m barrels a day. Saudi Arabian output averaged 8.3m barrels a day in the past two decades, or 32 per cent of shipments from the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, he said. The resumption of Iraqi supplies has lowered the kingdom's share of Opec production to about 28 per cent in the past five years, al- Moneef said. <strong>Bloomberg News</strong>