The international conversation over the future of oil and gas often focuses on demand trends while the factors affecting supply receive considerably less attention. The new IEA report, The Implications of Oil and Gas Field Decline Rates, seeks to rebalance this debate by drawing on previous groundbreaking IEA analysis on decline rates and exploring what has changed. The new analysis draws on production data from around 15 000 oil and gas fields from around the world.
The world needs to develop new oil and gas resources just to keep output flat amid faster declining rates at existing fields, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday in a major shift in its narrative from 2021 that ‘no new investment’ is needed in a net-zero by 2050 scenario.
Bloomberg’s Javier Blas reported the news in a column this week, citing a draft of the IEA report, World Energy Outlook. The agency uses a set of scenarios for the future, including some major assumptions, such as that all currently discussed climate-related policies would come into effect in full. Until 2020, the IEA included a Current Policy Scenario, which, as the name suggests, reflected actual policies being implemented.
Oil inventories will accumulate at a rate of 2.96 million bpd, surpassing even the average buildup during the pandemic year of 2020, data from the IEA’s monthly report showed. World oil demand this year and next is growing at less than half the pace seen in 2023.
House Republicans are moving forward with plans to pull U.S. funding for the International Energy Agency, saying the group has abandoned objectivity when it comes to projecting the growth of clean energy.
“This is expected to somewhat ease market fundamentals and eventually contribute to a stronger demand growth,” said Gergely Molnar, a gas analyst at the IEA, during a webinar. “2026 will be marking the first year of the LNG wave and it will be also in a way a test how demand responds to the stronger growth, especially in Asia.”
The United States could abandon the International Energy Agency (IEA) if the organization, created in the aftermath of the 1970s Arab oil embargo, doesn’t return to forecasting energy demand without strongly promoting green energy.
Oil prices may decline further this year as new production swells and demand remains capped by China’s faltering growth, the head of the International Energy Agency said.
While crude futures have recovered over the past two weeks to trade near $68 a barrel on London, they remain roughly 9% below levels traded before President Donald Trump announced a blizzard of tariffs on China and other nations on April 2.
“The surge is primarily driven by robust growing use of electricity for industrial production, increased demand for air conditioning, accelerating electrification, led by the transport sector, and the rapid expansion of data centres,” the International Energy Agency said.
The International Energy Agency has lowered its outlook for Russia’s oil production this year by only a narrow margin even with sweeping western energy sanctions, as the Paris-based organization expects the nation to come up with workarounds.