The International Energy Agency said Tuesday that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will make up more than half of global oil supplies within the next 25 years, putting the onus on the group to meet the largest part of world's energy demand.

As a result national oil companies, which play a dominant role in most OPEC countries, will account for all the rise in production by 2035, the agency said.

"The role of OPEC is going to increase substantially, and we expect that OPEC's share in the next 25 years will come over 50%--which for the first time will be equal to their share before the first oil price shock of 1973-1974," the IEA's chief economist Fatih Birol said in the organization's annual outlook report.

The IEA--which represents some of the world's largest energy consumers--tends to have a more bullish view of demand for OPEC oil than the producer group itself. By contrast OPEC's annual outlook report, published last week, predicts the group's share of supply rising only slightly, from 34.2% in 2010 to 36.7% in 2030.

But the OPEC forecast includes biofuels, most of them expected to be produced by non-OPEC members, while the executive summary of the IEA report doesn't specify if the OPEC supply share includes them.

However, the agency said oil demand excluding biofuels would rise by 15 million barrels a day to 99 million barrels a day in 2035, compared with 2009.

The IEA said OPEC's rising share of oil supply would be driven by output growth in Iraq and Saudi Arabia while non-OPEC output would fall.

The agency sees oil output in Iraq at 7 million barrels a day in 2035, compared with about 2.4 million barrels a day today, and forecasts Saudi production at 14.6 million barrels a day, compared with about 8.3 million a barrels a day today.

"The increasing share of OPEC contribute to the growing dominance of national oil companies," the IEA said. "As a group, they account for all of the increase in global production between 2009 and 2035."

However, OPEC generally has a more cautious approach than the IEA when it comes to demand for its oil because its members will have to take responsibility for the necessary investment.

Both the IEA and OPEC agree the supply predictions are fraught with risk though they disagree on the causes of uncertainty.

"The size of ultimately recoverable resources of both conventional and unconventional oil is a major source of uncertainty for the long-term outlook for world oil production," the IEA said in the executive summary of its report. On the other hand, OPEC last week blamed what it called "overly ambitious targets" for biofuels in the U.S. and Europe.

Between the most optimistic and most pessimist scenarios drafted by OPEC, the differences of investment it members must commit over the next decade reach a staggering $230 billion in real terms.

Διαβάστε ακόμα