IEA Cuts Oil Demand Forecast to Lowest in Five Years (Update1)
By Grant Smith
April 10 (Bloomberg) -- The International Energy Agency expects global oil demand to decline by 2.4 million barrels a day this year, about the same amount that Iraq produces, as the economic slump reduces consumption to the lowest since 2004.
The adviser to 28 nations cut its 2009 forecast for an eighth consecutive month, slashing last month’s estimate by 1 million barrels a day, or 1.2 percent, to 83.4 million barrels a day. The IEA also said oil supply from outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will drop this year.
“The pace of contraction is close to early 1980s levels, with a growing consensus that economic and oil demand recovery will be deferred to 2010,” the Paris-based adviser said in a monthly report today.
Demand will shrink by 2.8 percent this year as worldwide gross domestic product shrinks by 1.4 percent, according to the IEA, which until now had assumed the global economy would expand in 2009. The decline outpaces supply from OPEC’s third-largest producer, Iraq, which last month pumped 2.27 million barrels a day.
The outlook “implicitly discards” the agency’s earlier view that industrial activity, and demand for fuels, would recover in the second half of the year. Consumption during the first three months of this year was revised lower by 700,000 barrels a day.
Collapsing Demand
The collapse in demand will be concentrated in the world’s most developed nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, where an “unusually severe recession” will curb consumption by 4.9 percent this year.
As a result, crude inventories in these nations are at their highest since 1993, the IEA said. Stockpiles were equivalent to 61.6 days of consumption as of February. In December, OPEC ministers had expressed concern that a level of about 57 days was too high.
Non-OPEC supply will fall by 300,000 barrels a day this year, a second annual decline, to 50.3 million barrels a day. This is “largely because of adjustments on the biofuels side,” David Fyfe, head of the IEA’s oil industry and markets division, said in a phone interview from Paris.
That forecast is 320,000 barrels a day lower than last month’s, when the IEA expected non-OPEC output to be unchanged year-on-year. Supplies from outside OPEC may be curtailed by a further 360,000 barrels a day by the end of next year because of spending cuts in North America, the North Sea and Russia.
Future Supply Constraint
Over the next five years global supplies will be “severely constrained by today’s lower prices and lower investment,” the report said. Spending on new production will likely be constrained by around 20 percent this year.
OPEC, which supplies about 40 percent of the world’s oil, is still in the process of implementing reductions agreed last year totaling 4.2 million barrels a day.
The 11 OPEC nations bound by production quotas pumped 25.57 million barrels of crude oil a day last month, the IEA said, compared with their official Jan. 1 limit of 24.845 million a day. That implies the group has collectively completed 83 percent of its promised reduction, the IEA said.
Saudi Arabia’s compliance was highest, at 108 percent, while Iran and Angola were lowest at 44 percent and 45 percent respectively, according to IEA calculations.
Need for OPEC Oil
All 12 members, including Iraq, will need to provide about 28.2 million barrels of crude a day this year to balance global supply and demand, the IEA report showed. That’s a reduction of 700,000 barrels a day from last month’s assessment, driven by plummeting fuel use in developed economies.
Those same 12 OPEC members pumped 27.8 million barrels a day in March, 235,000 barrels a day fewer than the previous month, according to the IEA. Crude output in Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s biggest producer, was unchanged in March at 7.95 million barrels a day, the IEA said.
“In response to weaker demand Saudi Aramco cut the May price for its flagship Arab Light to all regions for the first time in five months,” the IEA report said, referring to prices announced by the Saudi state-run oil company on April 5.
To contact the reporter on this story: Grant Smith in London at gsmith52@bloomberg.net
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