Is the decline of oil in sight?

By Jocelyn TimperleyFeatures correspondent@jloistf

The International Energy Agency thinks peak oil use is in sight this decade as the world switches to renewables. What is driving this shift – and what is still standing in the way?

The idea of "peak oil" – a peak in the amount of oil we can physically extract, followed by an irreversible decline in production – has been around for decades. So far, though, it has never been reached on a global level.

In June, however, the International Energy Agency (IEA) – a global energy organisation that provides governments with analyses and policy support – announced we may soon reach a different but related value: a peak in the global use of (or "demand for") oil.

"We think that peak will be before the end of the decade, but just after 2028, so 2029 or 2030, most likely," says Ciarán Healy, an IEA oil market analyst and co-author of the report. "We have this picture of growth, but slowing growth [this decade], and oil staying very significant, but maybe the turning points are in sight."

Reaching a peak in oil use is by no means enough to tackle climate change – and an end of the decade peak will still fall far short of what is needed to keep global temperature rise within safe-ish limits. In fact, the IEA has previously outlined that for CO2 emissions from the energy sector to reach net zero by 2050 – a requirement for limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels – there needs to be an immediate halt to new coal mines, oil fields and gas fields.

But it would still be an important real-world signal that the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables is taking place on a global scale.

The IEA is not the only body to spell out an end for oil growth. Oil companies such as BP have also indicated they think the global demand for oil is in decline.

So, what lies behind these numbers – and what is preventing a faster decline? BBC Future here digs into the huge global changes happening behind these predictions.

Fossil-fuelling a fracas

A row has erupted at the COP28 summit in Dubai over earlier comments by its president, the UAE's Sultan al-Jaber.

"There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5C," he told an online meeting on 21 November.

Mr Jaber has hit back at claims the comments show he denies a core aspect of climate science.

Until the early 2010s, discussions over peak oil generally exclusively referred to concerns over peak oil production: the point at which crude oil reaches its maximum production capacity, followed by an irreversible decline.

This was a worrying concept for energy experts seeing a rising global dependence on oil, and there's no shortage of predictions of sometimes imminent arrival of peak oil production that haven't come to pass. One big reason the world hasn't reached this peak in recent years is the advent of unconventional oil sources such as shale oil and tar sands, combined with discoveries of large conventional oil fields in countries such as Guyana, Namibia and Brazil.

"There's always been new discoveries or new technologies, new ways of extracting oil," says Krista Halttunen, a research fellow in sustainable finance at the University of Oxford who co-authored a paper last year on peak oil while a PhD researcher at Imperial College London. "So we've never actually reached a peak – oil production capacity has been growing the entire time that we've had oil, really."

As concerns over climate change have grown over the past few decades, however, opinions around fossil fuel extraction have shifted enormously. With coal, oil and gas by far the largest contributors to global climate change, and a host of alternative renewable energy sources waiting at our fingertips, a reduction and phase-out of fossil fuels is seen as an urgent and necessary step.

As the world has begun to make efforts to move away from fossil fuels, a new concept of peak fossil fuels has emerged: that we will hopefully start cutting our need for them far before we use up all that is possible to extract from the Earth's crust. This is the point the IEA now thinks the world will reach at the end of the 2020s.

A surprise result

The IEA's new projections come from its latest medium-term oil report and are broadly aligned with its "stated policies scenario" (Steps) – a relatively conservative global scenario, which is based on what has already been put in place to achieve climate and other energy goals, rather than assuming all stated goals will be met.

"This is a view of what we think is going to happen based on things that people have said they're going to do or that we're confident are going to happen," says Healy. [...]. "We're doing our best job of trying to say what we think is the likely way things will play out." For oil demand to decline sooner, additional policy measures and behavioural changes would be needed, the IEA notes.

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Even tracking the current use of oil is a big job. "There's a big team of statisticians here that do nothing else, essentially," says Healy.

The five-year projection goes up to 2028 – when the IEA thinks the world will be just on the brink of reaching peak oil demand.

The report marks the first time the IEA has found global oil demand will peak in such a short timeframe. "When we ran the model, and there was a peak in it, it was a bit of a surprise," says Healy. "It was clearly a very interesting result."

The key to peaking oil use

To understand what the IEA thinks is now happening with peak oil demand, it's worth considering that the transport sector is by far the biggest consumer of oil: it accounts for around 60% of the 100 million barrels of oil used globally every day. "There's nothing else that takes up as much oil as transport," says Halttunen.

Of that, around 45% of the total, or around 45 million barrels a day, is used in road fuel for vehicles like cars, trucks and vans, says Healy. It's here where sweeping changes are already beginning to curb oil demand.

Two big factors are driving this: the advent of alternative vehicle fuels – especially electric vehicles – and increased vehicle efficiency.

Electric vehicles have been a huge success story, says Healy, and are already having an impact on gasoline demand – especially in China, Europe and North America. Globally, 14% of all new cars sold in 2022 were electric, up from 9% in 2021 and less than 5% in 2020.

"We expect that to continue to have a really big impact, as more and more electric vehicles are sold and displace the use of internal combustion engines in the fleet," says Healy.

The huge changes afoot in global transport are also not always particularly visible to all, notes Halttunen.

Biofuels

Biofuels – fuels made from organic sources such as crops, trees and organic waste – are also cutting oil demand to some extent.

Gasoline blended with ethanol is now widely used in the US and Australia, while Europe's E5 and E10 standards mean most petrol and diesel that Europeans buy at the pump contains ethanol.

China, for example, now has around 600,000 electric buses and 13.8 million electric cars on its roads – over half of the world's electric car fleet.

At the same time, rising vehicle efficiency in many countries across many types of transport, largely driven by government standards, are helping to blunt increases in oil demand.

"As the fleet is replaced, with older cars sold typically 15 to 20 years ago being replaced by new and much more efficient cars, or newer planes replacing much less efficient older planes [... it] helps to really limit the increase in all these different categories," says Healy.

Of course, these two limiting factors on global oil in transport use are being counteracted to some extent by the rising desire of people all over the globe to move about more.

"As populations grow, as the economy grows, people get richer in various parts of the world, especially in lower-to-middle-income countries," says Healy.

"You expect there to be this underlying upward pressure on people's demand for mobility and the implied fuel demand that goes with that."

The IEA thinks India, for example, will assume the fastest-growing role in the global oil market over the next five years.

Meanwhile, the insatiable rise of energy-hungry SUVs is driving up CO2 emissions, especially in the US.

Still, by 2026, IEA expects overall oil use in transport to peak and begin to decline. The reason overall oil demand will still be rising at this point is largely down to another sector altogether.

The rising production of plastics

Petrochemicals – chemical products derived from petroleum – are used to make all sorts of things from fertilisers and synthetic rubber to plastics and synthetic clothing. They currently account for around 16% of global oil use.

Driven by rising use of plastics and synthetic fibres, the use of petrochemical feedstocks continue to rise right through the IEA's forecast, outweighing the fall in transport demand right up to the end of the decade.

China is also a big player here: it is investing huge amounts in refineries to substitute current imports of plastics and fibres, locking in growth of the sector.

All this means the IEA doesn't think last year's global treaty to tackle plastic waste will have much of an impact on rising plastics production – at least not in the next five years. However, "in five years time, that might be one of the stories we're really honing in", says Healy.

The oil companies

The IEA is not alone in its findings about imminent peak oil demand – in fact some oil companies think it may have already happened.

In 2020, analysis by the website Carbon Brief showed that BP's own figures indicated global oil demand would not ever regain 2019 levels, following the pandemic slump in 2020, which saw a 9% drop in global oil demand. It was a huge change from previous BP outlooks. The most recent projections from BP this year all show global oil demand plateauing or declining from 2025 at the latest, depending on the strength of climate action, and declining up to 2050.

"BP is telling its shareholders that its main product is past its best. It's downhill from here," Hannah Ritchie, lead researcher at Our World in Data at the University of Oxford, wrote in an article about BP's forecast.

BP also says the primary reason behind this declining oil demand are changes in road transport, with the increasing efficiency of cars the main cause this decade, and the switch to electric cars the main driver by 2050.

Even if this begins as a slow declining trend, says Halttunen, "it's still a huge shift from the way investors have looked at the oil industry before and the companies have looked at their strategy before".

Tempered optimism

Reaching peak oil demand, as well as coal and gas, is a necessary step on the way to cutting greenhouse gas emissions – but there will still be a long way to go after that before a major reduction is seen in fossil fuel use.

"The single biggest thing that we have to do to mitigate climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels," says Halttunen. "We're so far from actually stopping, but any signs that we can reduce, or at least stop the growth, would be welcome."

However, a scenario where fossil fuels are simply less valuable – as would occur under a switch to renewables – is probably more realistic than one where fossil fuel companies willingly leave cash in the ground, she adds.

Currently, 82% of the world's total energy still comes from fossil fuels. Renewables such as solar and wind have seen a rapid rise in recent years (to 7.5% of global energy use), but from a low base.

Even to get to these levels has been incredible growth for renewables, says Halttunen – surpassing all the expectations of the International Energy Agency. But global energy use is also rising – the pandemic dip seen in the graph above was only temporary. "We still have developing countries increasing their energy use, even as some developed countries are actually reducing [use]," says Halttunen. If overall energy use outpaces renewables growth, we won't start reducing fossil fuels.

Healy says he sees the IEA's peak oil demand projection as "a hopeful thing" which shows there are already visible, real-world consequences to the right climate policies. But he also notes there is still a long way to go when it comes to curbing climate change.

"This isn't enough, this isn't close to the net zero trajectory," he says. "There is an enormous amount more to be done to get us onto that path."

* This story was originally published in July 2023 and updated on 4 December 2023 during the COP28 talks.

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