In a story that did not originate with the renowned digital satire magazine The Onion or its incomparable Canadian counterpart, The Beaverton, an influential U.S. think tank is claiming that global oil demand will never peak.
“The world will continue to demand more and more oil as countries get richer and demand for energy rises,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at the Washington, DC-based Heritage Foundation, told fossil industry newsletter Rigzone last month. “Oil demand keeps going up and recoverable oil resources rise too, as technology improves and we have horizontal drilling and fracking.”
The Heritage Foundation is the institutional home of Project 2025, the alarming, 900-page governing blueprint that dozens of former Trump administration officials have been developing in the hope that their candidate will win a second term in the White House. That plan, written off by one news report as “a shoestring operation struggling with internal disagreements, political miscalculation, and questionable leadership,” was blasted by the Kamala Harris campaign and disavowed by Trump before its director resigned last week.
Heritage’s energy projections would appear to be on similarly shaky ground, with multiple recent analyses—at least one of them from a leading fossil fuel producer—pointing to an imminent peak in global demand for both oil and gas:
• Just three weeks ago, global fossil giant BP forecast that global oil demand will peak next year, though it still anticipated high enough demand through the 2030s to drive average global warming above 2°C.
• In January, UK-based Carbon Tracker warned that private equity investors are facing the transition out of fossil fuels with “eyes wide shut”, exposing themselves to severe financial risk as peak demand for oil, gas, and coal gets closer.
• Last September, the International Energy Agency projected that global oil and gas demand will start to fall before 2030, marking the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era. In June, 2024, the Paris-based IEA reiterated that global oil demand will hit its all-time high this decade, producing a surplus of millions of barrels per day that will start driving down production within a few years.
• In August, 2023, analysis by climate think tank E3G showed global gas demand nearing its peak.
All of those assessments factored in the plummeting costs of renewable energy and energy storage, mostly without fully accounting for the costs of the climate impacts brought on by continued fossil fuel burning.
But Heritage wasn’t the only think tank cited in Rigzone’s coverage. American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Benjamin Zycher said he could see “no reason to believe that global consumption of fossil fuels will reach a peak anytime over the foreseeable future,” the publication writes.
“Fossil fuels will continue to be the efficient form of energy in most applications, the subsidies needed to make unconventional energy ‘competitive’ are not sustainable, and the unreliability and other adverse characteristics of unconventional energy means that they cannot satisfy soaring energy demands anywhere, Africa and the less-developed world in particular,” Zycher said.
The most recent research by the International Monetary Fund put global fossil fuel subsidies at US$7 trillion in 2022—accounting for 7.1% of global GDP, or more than $13.3 million per minute. Those numbers vastly exceed public funding available to renewables, not to mention the climate finance that rich countries have been promising since 2009 to developing nations on the front lines of the climate emergency.
