Africa has an estimated $125-billion-worth of potential reserves in undeveloped oil and gas fields, according to a study by global energy research company, Wood Mackenzie.

This is less than the potential value of North American reserves ($132 billion) and Latin American reserves ($149 billion,) according to a report in OilReviewAfrica.

There is a vast potential value from good technical fields across the world, according to the report. The Middle East holds the most valuable portfolio ($185 billion).

The latest upstream outlook from Wood Mackenzie reports there are nearly 1.4 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, or boe, reserves in conventional undeveloped oil and gas fields globally.

This figure includes nearly 1.1 trillion boe of  “technical reserves,” or reserves for which there are no firm development plans in place.

“Over half of these discoveries which we classify as ‘good technicals,’ are potentially economic under our current price assumptions,” said David Highton, principal analyst of upstream research at Wood Mackenzie. “These have an indicative collective value of about $760 billion.”

Wood Mackenzie’s outlook predicts that around 300 billion boe of undeveloped commercial reserves will be brought onstream in the next decade or so.

Commercializing the unfulfilled potential of undeveloped discoveries will be difficult, according to the report, as there are a number of obstacles to be overcome.

“These could be the lack of accessible markets or available infrastructure, political or environmental issues, operator constraints, or simply low resource volumes for the particular location,” the report said.