Saudi Arabia has halted the $100bn expansion of its oil production capacity after reaching a target of 12m barrels a day as the kingdom believes that new oil sources will meet rising demand.

Khalid al-Falih, chief executive of state-owned Saudi Aramco, said on Monday that pressure on Riyadh to raise its output capacity had “substantially reduced”, the clearest indication yet that the world’s top oil producer is not pushing ahead with an assumed expansion plan to 15m b/d by the end of 2020.

The comments put a cap at least temporarily on a $100bn expansion programme that started in the early 2000s when Saudi was able to produce about 8.5m b/d. The halt comes in spite of tightness in the market due to production disruptions in Libya, Syria and Yemen.