“Kuwait Bets on Oil Demand Despite IEA's 'Peak' Projection”, BY DAVID BLACKMON
Of note is fact that none of the members of OPEC were supporters of the IEA, a situation that remains the case today. Instead, the signatories included an array of EU in addition to Canada and the US.
Kuwait Bets on Oil Demand Despite IEA's 'Peak' Projection
Originally created in 1974 in the wake of the first Arab Oil Embargo, IEA’s original mission was to provide its 17 initial funding nations with reliable, accurate information about global oil supplies and demand in order to help them raise their levels of energy security. Of note is the fact that none of the members of OPEC were supporters of the IEA, a situation that remains the case today. Instead, the signatories included an array of European countries in addition to Canada and the United States.
Today, half a century later, the IEA’s subscribing countries have expanded to more than 30, including several from Central and South America, along with Australia and New Zealand. But still noticeably absent are any OPEC nations.
As IEA’s membership has expanded, it has experienced a corresponding progression of what we in the US like to refer to as “mission creep,” an unfortunate circumstance in which the assignment of a given project or organization tends to expand wildly outside its initial area of focus and/or expertise as time goes on.
Today, the IEA’s website boast of a mission that as much about meeting globalist climate change objectives as it does about providing anything resembling reliable information about supply and demand for crude oil:
We provide reliable and comprehensive data, analysis, and policy recommendations with the goal of shaping a secure, sustainable and affordable energy future for all while meeting the climate change objectives of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
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Unfortunately, the IEA under its clownish leader Fatih Birol interprets the part about “meeting the climate change objectives” as meaning it is obligated to push the preferred narratives coming out of the UN, WEF and annual COP conferences, and boosting it with claims of “Peak Oil” demand arriving far sooner than anyone actually risking billions of dollars in the oil business sanely expect.
No wonder the OPEC countries and Russia choose to abstain from wasting money on what has become basically a propaganda enterprise.
Leaders in Kuwait showed exactly what they think of the IEA’s projection that the world will reach “peak oil” demand in just a few years from now this past Thursday. On that day, Kuwait Petroleum Corp. CEO Sheikh Nawaf Al-Sabah said in an interview with Bloomberg that his company is embarking on plans to invest roughly $33 billion in the next 5 years on efforts to ramp up oil production in order to meet rising global demand.
Oh.
Here’s an excerpt from the story at Bloomberg:
Kuwait Petroleum Corp. plans to spend about 10 billion dinars ($33 billion) over five years to ramp up oil production capacity, betting on robust demand for decades to come.
“We’re looking to make massive investments,” Chief Executive Officer Sheikh Nawaf Al-Sabah said in an interview. That’s “not only to maintain our production capacity, but ultimately grow it like our strategy calls for us to do.”
Kuwait’s bullish outlook for demand chimes with a number of other producers and traders such as TotalEnergies SE and Vitol Group. Yet the International Energy Agency, an adviser to key consuming nations, has said oil use will stop growing by 2030 as the shift to electric vehicles and renewables gathers pace.
KPC’s outlay is part of a 20 billion-dinar investment program that started in April and covers everything from upstream to petrochemicals. The state-owned firm’s exploration and production division targets capacity of 3.2 million barrels a day next year, and ultimately 4 million barrels a day by 2035.
“The market in oil demand — looking to 2050 and beyond — will continue to be more or less where it is now,” Sheikh Nawaf said. “Who’s going to supply that oil? We are both lowest cost and lowest carbon intensity, and we intend to remain there.”
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Kuwait Petroleum Corp’s plans to ramp up production are in line with OPEC’s official view that global crude demand will continue rising at least through 2050 and probably beyond as efforts in the western world to subsidize EVs up to scale fail to cut deeply into the use of internal combustion transportation.
KPC’s plans and statements are also in line with the business plans of ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and other major corporate oil companies who have refocused the vast majority of their own capital investments on their core oil and gas business units after several years of prioritizing projects designed to improve ESG scores and provide opportunities for virtue signaling.
Thus, while Birol and his bureaucrats at the IEA engage in mocking up their silly, unrealistic projections pushing the always-wrong ‘peak oil’ religion, the risk takers are refocused on the business of powering the world.
The world is healing itself.
That is all.
