A new study has found oil fields in Saudi Arabia to be among the lowest generators of greenhouse gases.

The study, which was authored by scientists at Stanford University and Saudi Aramco, credited Saudi Arabia’s relatively low emissions rate to the natural productivity of its light oil fields and the low incidence of natural gas flaring in the kingdom – a technique that puts the highly polluting greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere.

The study only looked at countries that supply a significant share of China’s oil market, the world’s largest importer of crude oil, and did not take into account the US, which only began exporting crude after the US Congress lifted a decades-long ban in late 2015.

"China has been the world’s largest growth market for energy for the past 15 years and accounted for about 43 per cent of the world’s oil consumption growth over this period," the report says.

Ranked at the bottom was Venezuela, where oil fields measured a carbon intensity six times that in Saudi Arabia.

In Venezuela, the use of the enhanced oil recovery method of steam flooding to increase flow rates from its heavy oil fields resulted in the highest carbon intensity in the world.

The amount of greenhouse gas emitted during the production of oil and gas – whether through burning fossil fuels to power equipment or natural gas leaks – is likely to be increasingly looked at in the decades ahead, as governments try to prevent global temperatures increasing by more than 2°C.