As the end of day III of CERAWeek nears, for the Oilholic one panel session stood out in particular - Oil Demand: How will it look in a decade? This emotive and extremely polarizing subject turned hot late last year after the International Energy Agency issued a forecast predicting a peaking of oil demand in the 2030s.
Naturally, OPEC blasted the IEA and said demand would continue to grow for many, many years. It also offered a bullish scenario of 116 million barrels per day in global oil demand by 2045.
If the Oilholic were to offer his tuppence, oil will indeed continue to be a major part of the energy landscape not just for many years, but many decades. The stark reality of the matter is that no one can say for sure when oil demand will peak whether it is the IEA or OPEC.
But kudos for the CERAWeek panelists to have at least tried. They included names familiar to the readers of this blog - Joseph McMonigle, Secretary General of International Energy Forum and Jeff Currie, a former Goldman Sachs partner and Chief Strategy Officer of Energy Pathways at Carlyle.
Both were joined by Fred Forthuber, President of Oxy Energy Services, and Arjun Murti, Partner, Energy Macro and Policy at Veriten, and another former Goldman Sachs executive. The discussion was as lively as it gets. Here's the Oilholic's full report on the goings-on of the panel via Forbes.
The panel followed a related quip by Shaikh Nawaf al-Sabah, CEO of Kuwait Petroleum Company, earlier in the day's proceedings. He told delegates that global energy demand will increase faster than the population growth rates through to 2050. "That means that we're going to require more energy intensity for the population in the world."
KPC's answer - why of course - increase its production capacity to 4 million bpd by 2035 from its current level of 3 million bpd.
See, again the thing here is (as asserted earlier by yours truly), if the various forecasters can't even agree on what demand growth will be like at the end of 2024 (with the IEA predicting 1.3 million bpd and OPEC predicting 2.25 million bpd) - how can they predict for sure what the approaching horizon may look like in 2030! And on that note, it's time to say goodbye. More musings to follow soon. Keep reading, keep it here, keep it 'crude'!
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© Gaurav Sharma 2024. Photo: CERAWeek 2024 panel on - Oil Demand: How will it look in a decade? © Gaurav Sharma, March 2024.
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