With the price of oil shooting through the roof, one of the most fascinating questions is just how much all the oil out there is actually worth. The other big question is how do you get your slice of it?

I’m sitting in for Ben today. As you know, he’s on holiday until Wednesday. He’s stuck me here in the hot-seat while he’s off to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival.

Rather than trying to match his wit, let me just tell you about one of the big trends that I have been exploring with readers of my Profit Hunter investment service: the great Petrodollar migration — the colossal transfer of wealth to the oil exporting countries.

With the price of oil shooting through the roof, one of the most fascinating questions is just how much all the oil out there is actually worth.

The other big question is how do you get your slice of it?

I’m going to give you an answer to both of them today.

Forty times bigger than the UK

At $100 a barrel, the oil exporting countries are sitting on total proven reserves of about $104,000 billion: $104,000,000,000,000.

That’s equal to the value all publicly-traded shares and bonds in the world.

Putting it another way, that’s about FORTY times the value of entire UK economy last year. Forty times the value of all the goods and services that we produced in this country in 2007 — from every ice-cream and donkey-ride sold in Margate to the biggest deals in the City.

You can probably already see that there is a fortune to be made here if you can get your hands on even a tiny slice of that.

So, who has got what?

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.

Position yourself to profit from a tide of petrodollars

And the oil exporters are now using that enormous wealth to begin snapping-up foreign assets. You’ve just got to look at the figures to see the scale of what’s happening. And why I’m so excited by it…

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

Stop for just a minute and think about that. I mean really think about what that means, because the sums involved are truly staggering. $12.2 trillion dollars is almost FOUR AND A HALF times the size of the entire economic output of Britain in 2007!

And even if oil the price falls to $70 per barrel the petrodollar economies are going accumulate foreign investments worth $10 trillion by 2013.

And this isn’t something that is going to happen at some point in the future. It’s happening right now.

What we are now witnessing is 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.

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