Another Million Barrels per Day, Each Year

Americans out! Stop worrying about the state of the world and go make the stuffing. I'm only allowed in here because I'm a British citizen as well as a US citizen :-)



For the rest of you, recall that on Monday, I looked at the tendency for consumption to keep rising in the developing world, despite oil shocks etc. I wrote:

To get a better handle on the implications of this, lets look at the behavior of different regions consuming oil historically. In particular, I want to look at past eras of high oil prices so I'm going to go back all the way to 1965 now. I'm going to divide the world's oil consumers into five categories

• OECD (ie. developed) countries (the US, most European countries, Japan, Australia, etc), 
• OPEC oil producers (Saudia Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela etc), 
• Asian countries not in the OECD (China, India, Thailand, etc), 
• the former Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine, etc), 
• the rest of the world (eg non-OPEC Latin America and Africa). 

I've plotted the annual oil consumption for each of these groups since 1965 in this next chart:

Today's graph just focusses in on that. Here's the gain in non-OECD consumption each year, in those groups I outlined, from 2002-2008 (from BP statistics). On average, it comes out to about an additional 1mbd of consumption each year. Given that it went on right through the oil price spike of 2004-2008, that's probably not going to stop, and unless global oil supply starts sustained growth again, those increases have to come from developed country consumption.