OPEC nations, reports the Financial Times, earned as much in the first half of this year as they did in the whole of 2007.

According to the report, member nations pocketed a staggering $645 billion in the first six months of 2008, just under the record $671 billion they earned last year. This puts OPEC nations on track to earn a record $1,245 billion this year, despite the recent 20 percent drop in oil prices, as any price drop will be offset by an increase in demand.

Profit Hunter’s Manraaj Singh calls it the “biggest transfer in history.”

Think about it this way: At $100 a barrel, the oil exporting countries are sitting on total proven reserves of about $104,000 billion. This means they are worth $104,000,000,000,000. Manraaj says:

The six Gulf Co-operation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) have the lion’s share with about $48,000 billion in reserves.

The other members of the OPEC oil cartel own another $44,000 billion.

That leaves the non-OPEC oil producers like Canada, Norway, Mexico and Russia with a relatively measly $12,000 billion worth of oil reserves.

You can already see that the big winners from the great petrodollar migration are going to be the OPEC oil cartel members.

But that doesn’t really capture the scale of the wealth that these countries have got. Because that $104 trillion figure is just the proven reserves that these countries have — what has already been discovered. It doesn’t take into account the potential value of further probable reserves that they might have.

And of course oil isn’t trading at $100 per barrel anymore either.

Where the big money is

Let’s just zoom in on the Gulf countries. Right now they’re raking-in a billion dollars every single day from oil exports. And with oil at $130 per barrel, these countries alone are actually sitting on about $65,000 billion worth of oil.

That’s three times the total value of all the shares on all the stock markets in the world.

How do investors take advantage of the situation? According to Manraaj, we are witnessing nothing less than a global re-alignment of financial power… and the profit opportunities for those positioned to benefit from it are going to be huge.

The key, says Manraaj, is to follow the money. Oil exporters are now using their enormous wealth to snap-up foreign assets…

At the end of 2007, the oil exporters collectively owned $4.6 trillion in foreign financial assets. Almost half of that — $2.25 trillion — was owned by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states.

And this is just the beginning of a colossal shift in economic and financial power away from the old “core” Western countries towards the oil producers.

Because if oil prices remain at $100 per barrel over the next five years, the value foreign assets purchased with petrodollars will grow to $12.2 trillion by 2013.

That money is now going in ever-larger proportions to Asia…

Traditionally, the oil exporters re-invested the bulk of their petrodollars in Western securities and assets. That’s changing fast though. A lot more of that money is now being invested at home and in the fast-growing Asian economies.

In 2002, nearly 85% of the Gulf’s wealth was invested abroad in financial instruments mostly linked to the U.S. Dollar. By 2007, though, that was down to 75% as they increasingly focussed on the Gulf itself, Asia and Africa. You can bet that that is only going to keep on rising because growth in those regions far outstrips what we’re seeing in the US and Europe.

So that’s where you’ve got to position your investments if you want to take advantage of this petrodollar bonanza.

Meanwhile, The Oxford Club’s Alexander Green has been recommending the Dow Jones Global Titans Fund (AMEX:DGT) as a way of tapping into the petrodollar tide.

Alex says this fund is holding exactly the mega-cap global companies that Sovereign Wealth Funds (many of them run by oil-rich nations) are likely to plow money into for many years to come.