Shell is Wrong: Global Oil Demand Can Only Increase
85% of the world population still has a lot of development potential, and they will need a lot more energy. Many of those will never quite reach it. Much of what we assume to be growth today rests on the assumption that as a poorer country all you have to do is sweatshop your way out of poverty and that the richer world will always buy. This changes now. The richer world wants to stay richer, and they cannot do so if all their manufacturing goes bye-bye. They know that now. That’s hard for the developing countries. Changing that would mean hard reforms of their systems but that was never on the agenda to begin with.
Bolstered by the U.S. shale revolution, global oil production has surged by over 20 percent in the past 15 years. The great rise has put to bed the “peak oil production” theory but it has not stopped the apparent new concern of “peak oil demand,” now portrayed as perhaps the main threat to the future of the world’s oil industry.
