(Bloomberg) — OPEC’s top official said forecasts that oil demand is heading toward a peak will prove just as misguided as earlier predictions that supply was reaching its zenith.
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“Ultimately, peak oil supply has never come to pass, and predictions of peak oil demand are following a similar trend,” Secretary-General Haitham Al Ghais said in a statement on the group’s website. “Peak oil demand is not showing up in any reliable and robust short- and medium-term forecasts.”
Many forecasters project that oil demand is set to max out in coming years, as countries switch to renewable energy and electric vehicles in an effort to avoid catastrophic climate change. The International Energy Agency in Paris anticipates a peak before the end of this decade.
Al Ghais said that technological advances — which thwarted some geologists’ fears in the last century that oil supplies would start to run out — will also extend fossil fuel demand.
The development of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, helped drive the US shale industry and reversed the country’s declining output. Al Ghais said that innovations to improve fuel efficiency or capture and store carbon emissions, often known as CCUS, will similarly buoy hydrocarbons.
“Time and again, oil has defied expectations regarding peaks,” Al Ghais said. “Logic and history suggest that it will continue to do so.”
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