EIR Says Oil Demand Will Not Peak Before 2030

That was one of the key takeaways from a new report published by Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR), the company highlighted in a statement sent to Rigzone.

“EIR expects global oil demand to grow to approximately 108 million barrels per day by 2030,” EIR noted in the statement.

“Chief among their evidence is that fuel economy standards have underwhelmed their stated targets, while electric vehicle momentum appears to be slowing in the U.S.,” the company added.

“Rising supply costs and the lack of new supply projects announced to date are likely to push oil prices higher, particularly in the post-2030 period. This, combined with off-oil measures, could result in peak demand next decade,” it continued.

“Overall, EIR does not see the needed material shifts in consumption per-capita trends by region and product, nor does it see the disconnect between economic growth and oil consumption needed for oil consumption to peak prior to 2030,” the company went on to note.

In the statement, EIR pointed out that another key takeaway of the report was that, “for more bullish (OPEC) or bearish (IEA) estimates for global oil demand growth to come to fruition by 2030, significant changes to consumption per capita trends and a disassociation between global economic growth and oil consumption must occur now”.

“History is not in their favor,” EIR added.

Al Salazar, a director at EIR and the author of the report, said in the statement, “both OPEC and IEA global oil demand estimates require a significant change in consumption behavior or a reversal of off-oil measures over a short period”.

“Instead, we believe the rate of demand growth will gradually slow but not peak. However, the regional dispersion of the growth changes dramatically,” Salazar added.

In its latest short term energy outlook (STEO), the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) increased its global liquid fuels consumption forecast for 2024 and 2025.

According to that STEO, the EIA now sees total consumption averaging 102.91 million barrels per day this year and 104.26 million barrels per day next year. In its previous March STEO, the EIA projected that total consumption would average 102.43 million barrels per day in 2024 and 103.81 million barrels per day in 2025.

“This month’s STEO incorporates the recent update to our International Energy Statistics for 2022. This update increased our assessment of global liquid fuels consumption for 2022 by nearly 0.8 million barrels per day compared with last month’s STEO,” the IEA said in its latest report.

Most of this change reflects non-OECD consumption that is higher than the EIA previously estimated, the organization noted in the STEO.

“The higher baseline historical data for 2022 in turn increased our estimate of consumption in 2023 and our forecasts for 2024 and 2025,” the EIA said in the STEO.

“We now estimate that global liquid fuels consumption averaged 102.0 million barrels per day in 2023, a 2.0 million barrel per day increase from 2022 and about 1.0 million barrels per day higher than in last month’s STEO,” it added.

“Global liquid fuels consumption in our forecast now averages 102.9 million barrels per day in 2024 and 104.3 million barrels per day in 2025, which is between 0.4 million barrels per day and 0.5 million barrels per day more in both years than in last month’s STEO,” it continued.

Year over year forecast consumption growth in 2025 is largely unchanged compared with the March STEO, the EIA said in the report.

“Although the revisions to historical consumption resulted in more forecast petroleum consumption, they also decreased demand growth in 2024 compared with our previous STEO,” the EIA noted in the report.

“However, the sources of growth remain the same; non-OECD Asian countries, particularly China and India, drive global liquid fuels demand growth in our forecast, although we also expect significant growth in the Middle East and United States,” it added.