MW It might not be Peak Oil after all. IEA now says, on current path, that demand will grow until 2050.

By Steve Goldstein

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (L), tours an oil rig at the conclusion of a campaign event at the Permian Deep Rock Oil Company site on September 20, 2023 in Midland, Texas. Oil and gas demand may keep growing for the next 25 years, according to an estimate released Wednesday.

The key international agency forecasting energy demand now says the current path will have consumption of oil and gas growing through 2050, as electric-vehicle adoption misses its earlier estimates.

In its current policies scenario, the International Energy Agency forecast demand for oil rises to 113 million barrels per day through 2050, as electric vehicle uptake stalls outside of China and Europe. Global natural-gas demand rises to 5.6 billion cubic meters by 2050 as Asian economies get sources from new pipelines from Russia to China as well by increased flows of liquefied natural gas.

The IEA also has a "stated policies" scenario to see how oil and gas demand would play out if countries lived up to their policies even if they are not yet codified in law. In this situation, oil demand peaks at 102 million barrels a day around 2030, as global electric vehicle market share rises to over 50% by 2035 from over 20% despite less U.S. take-up. Natural gas, in this scenario, increases by nearly 1% to 2035, and coal demand peaks before 2030.

And finally, the IEA has a net-zero emissions scenario. This sees a tripling of renewables capacity by 2030 from 2022 levels to get those low-emissions sources to account for three-quarters of demand by 2035, from roughly one-third now.

The report from the IEA comes as the Trump administration has pushed back on efforts to restrain output to meet climate goals. The COP30 summit in Brazil has no U.S. federal government representatives, though California Gov. Gavin Newsom is among the Americans attending.

The IEA says the world is heading toward an outcome of global warming of 2.5 to 3 degrees Celsius, which is above the 1.5 degree increase set in the Paris agreement signed in 2015 that was designed to avoid the worst impact of climate change.

CPS stands for current policies scenario, STEPS stands for stated policies scenario and NZE stands for net zero emissions by 2050 scenario. MER means market exchange rate.

The price scenarios are wildly different - in a net-zero scenario, crude trades at $25 a barrel in 2050, versus $106 in a current scenario, with similar price discrepancies in natural gas and coal.

Crude (CL00) was trading just over $60 on Wednesday, while the lead natural-gas contract (NG00), which has soared over 50% this year, was trading at $4.76.

-Steve Goldstein

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November 12, 2025 06:06 ET (11:06 GMT)

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