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Germany Considers Extending Oil Reserve Relief Despite Falling Prices
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Julianne Geiger
What I Cover Julianne Geiger is a veteran energy journalist and market analyst with more than a decade of experience covering the global oil and…
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Every year, OPEC releases a long-term outlook that says oil demand will keep growing. Every year, critics roll their eyes.
This year, OPEC doubled down.
In its World Oil Outlook 2026, the producer group said global oil demand will climb from 105.1 million barrels per day in 2025 to 113.3 million bpd by 2030 and top 124 million bpd by 2050. More importantly, OPEC says there is still no peak oil demand in sight.
That’s a bold claim in a world where EV sales dominate headlines, governments continue talking about net-zero targets, and energy transition advocates have spent years forecasting oil’s slow decline.
But buried inside OPEC’s latest outlook is an argument that’s harder to dismiss than the forecast itself.
The organization is essentially saying that the peak-demand crowd has become obsessed with what is happening in rich countries while ignoring what is happening almost everywhere else.
Much of the conversation around oil demand revolves around EV adoption in Europe, California, and China. OPEC’s outlook is based on a much simpler observation: billions of people outside the OECD still want cars, air conditioning, air travel, consumer goods, and reliable electricity.
India alone is expected to add more than 8 million barrels per day of oil demand by 2050. Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and the rest of developing Asia are expected to contribute most of the remaining growth.
In other words, OPEC isn’t betting on Berlin, it’s betting on Bangalore.
The report also throws cold water on another favorite assumption of the transition narrative: that electric vehicles will quickly eliminate oil demand. OPEC expects EV adoption to continue growing rapidly, but still sees internal combustion vehicles accounting for roughly three-quarters of the global vehicle fleet in 2050.
Cars aren’t even the biggest story.
Petrochemicals, aviation, trucking, shipping, data centers, manufacturing, and growing middle classes all require energy. And a lot of it.
Meanwhile, OPEC now sees U.S. shale growth slowing significantly and approaching a plateau around 2030, removing one of the biggest sources of supply growth the market has relied on for the past decade.
None of this guarantees that OPEC is right. The organization has every reason to be optimistic about oil’s future.
But after years of predictions that demand was about to roll over, the world keeps consuming more oil, not less.
At some point, it becomes fair to ask whether peak demand keeps getting pushed into the future because it was never as close as everyone thought.
By Julianne Geiger for Oilprice.com
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