• 3 minutes e-car sales collapse
  • 6 minutes America Is Exceptional in Its Political Divide
  • 11 minutes Perovskites, a ‘dirt cheap’ alternative to silicon, just got a lot more efficient
  • 23 mins GREEN NEW DEAL = BLIZZARD OF LIES
  • 1 hour How Far Have We Really Gotten With Alternative Energy
  • 3 hours If hydrogen is the answer, you're asking the wrong question
  • 4 days Oil Stocks, Market Direction, Bitcoin, Minerals, Gold, Silver - Technical Trading <--- Chris Vermeulen & Gareth Soloway weigh in
  • 5 days The European Union is exceptional in its political divide. Examples are apparent in Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden, Netherlands, Belarus, Ireland, etc.
  • 16 hours Biden's $2 trillion Plan for Insfrastructure and Jobs
  • 4 days "What’s In Store For Europe In 2023?" By the CIA (aka RFE/RL as a ruse to deceive readers)
Irina Slav

Irina Slav

Irina is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.

More Info

Premium Content

Russia Is Making A Mad Dash To Outrun Peak Oil Demand

Several of the world’s largest oil-producing nations have recently made public plans to boost their production capacity. The reason: peak oil demand is looming and countries are determined to make the most of their oil resources while they can.

“Everything that can be produced should be produced while there is still demand to sell it,” the head of the energy committee at the Duma, the Russian parliament, said last month at the presentation of a draft document aiming to do just that.

“The main thesis in this strategy is the monetization of current reserves and resources – that is, the maximum monetization of exports,” Pavel Zavalny also said at the event.

Russia is one of the three biggest oil exporters in the world, alongside Saudi Arabia and the United States. It has enough oil to keep producing at current rates at least until 2080, with enough gas reserves to last for another 103 years. And the state is pouring billions—$110 billion to be precise—into the development of new oil reserves in eastern Siberia to tap 100 million tons of new crude annually. That’s about a fifth of the country’s annual output in 2019.

Much of this oil will replace depleting fields in western Siberia. According to the Energy Ministry of the country, Russia does not seem to have plans to considerably boost current production rates. In the last pre-pandemic year, the daily production rate was 11.3 million bpd, a record high. Now, the Energy Ministry sees the current - constrained - production rate rising from 10.3 million bpd to 11.1 million bpd by 2029 before beginning to decline. In other words, Russia has eight years to take advantage of growing global oil demand as per its own scenario.

Yet, there are various scenarios for the peak of oil demand. BP, for instance, predicted that in the worst-case scenario peak oil demand has already arrived, and in the best-case scenario, it will come in 2030. Norway’s Equinor expects peak oil demand sometime in 2027 or 2028. Rystad Energy sees demand peaking in five years, and the International Energy Agency expects peak demand over the next decade. All in all, forecasts are within the range of 2030.

Related Video: Michigan - Enbridge Pipeline War Hits Climax

This means producers such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the Gulf nations have very little time to make the most of their oil reserves before demand begins declining steadily. And with all of these countries boosting their production capacity and making plans for higher production, competition in the oil market is bound to become even more severe than it is now.

When it comes to competition, Russia is better positioned than its Middle Eastern partners. It has always been less dependent on oil export revenues than Middle Eastern producers. Recently, it has been deliberately reducing this dependence. Oil and gas revenues still account for a solid 30 percent of gross domestic product, but with things like hydrogen catching the eye of the Kremlin, diversification is slowly but surely underway. Still, there are all those billions of barrels of oil sitting in the ground, and it would be a pity to keep them there, hence the plans to boost production. But who will be buying?

In terms of export destinations, Russia has mixed luck. Its biggest client by far is China, which is good for future oil asset monetization plans. Its second-biggest client is Europe, and that continent will be reducing its oil intake fast if everything in the EU’s energy transition scheme goes as planned. That means Russia will need to find new buyers for all the new oil it will be pumping from eastern Siberia.

India is an obvious candidate. The country imports 80 percent of the oil it burns, and it likes it cheap because of that. In India, Russia will be competing with its OPEC partners and the United States, for whom India is also a top oil export destination. The rest of emerging Asia will also be a key market for oil exporters as peak demand draws nearer and nearer.

Oil producers are then in a rush to sell as much oil as they can while there are still buyers, it seems, based on demand forecasts. But the truth is that peak oil demand may indeed come in ten years or fewer, but it does not mean demand will then fall off a cliff—unless another pandemic hits the planet, that is. In the absence of such an unforeseen event, oil demand is likely to decline pretty gradually, giving forward-looking producers plenty of time to adjust by boosting their non-oil sectors. From this perspective, Russia has enough time to reduce oil and gas revenues as a portion of GDP. Whether it will use this time wisely to achieve those aims remains to be seen.

ADVERTISEMENT

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:


Download The Free Oilprice App Today

Back to homepage





Leave a comment
  • Mamdouh Salameh on May 17 2021 said:
    There is no evidence whatsoever of peak oil demand. Any talk about an impending peak is premature and is based on wishful thinking and self-delusion for the following reasons.

    1- There will neither be a post-oil era nor an alternative yet as versatile as oil throughout the 21st century and probably far beyond.
    2- With growing world population and rising global GDP the demand for oil will continue to rise well into the future.
    3- When oil majors like BP, Shell and Equinor talk about an approaching peak oil demand, they mean their peak not the world’s. Oil supermajors likeTotal, BP, Shell, Chevron, ENI, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Equinor and Repsol have oil reserves projected to last 8-10.5 years compared with 66-91 years for countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, UAE, Venezuela and Kuwait to name but a few. Between 1998 and 2002, oil majors replaced 99.7% of oil produced. This declined to 51.7% between 2003 and 2007. Their average reserves in place have fallen by 25% since 2015. Shell, for instance, expects to have produced 75% of its current proven oil and gas reserves by 2030, and only around 3% after 2040. The oil reserves of these companies are declining fast and they can’t replace what they are producing because of rising resource nationalism.

    Russia has enough crude oil reserves in the Arctic to enable it to continue production at least until 2080 but with advancing technology these reserves could be enhanced very significantly thus enabling it to continue to produce oil virtually indefinitely.

    Moreover, Russia has assured markets, namely China and the EU. Russia as the world’s superpower of energy is wedded politically, economically and strategically to the world’s largest oil and energy market, China. Furthermore, Russia can produce oil very highly competitively even in comparison with the Arab Gulf producers.

    So the claim by the author that Russia is making a dash to outrun peak oil demand is a figment of imagination.

    Dr Mamdouh G Salameh
    International Oil Economist
    Visiting Professor of Energy Economics at ESCP Europe Business School, London
  • Arch Region on May 17 2021 said:
    For this mad rush to cash oil reserves, as the looming global climate change disaster is teetering at the edge of oblivion, Kremlin will face crimes against humanity charges one day.

    The defense that climate deniers "we were just following the profit motive for the good of our shareholders", will work as well as the defence "we were just following orders" at the Nuremberg trials.

    George Bush the father of Global Climate Change denialism, the scuttler of the 1992 Global Climate Accord in Rio, will not be remembered favorably in history books.
  • Lars H on May 17 2021 said:
    Peak oil, for at least 50 years they have talked about peak oil. Will never happen. Mark my words.
  • Anton Sartorini on May 18 2021 said:
    Stop lying about peak oil. Not so long ago you said we had already had peak oil. There is no such thing as peak oil.
  • Arch Region on May 18 2021 said:
    I have no quibbles about peak oil. The reality is zero oil, as in no more fossil fuels - nada - is coming to a country near you, sooner than you think. This means our children will no longer have to breath contaminate air 24 - 7, that causes asthma and cancer . So rejoice and invest in clean health-giving renewables.
  • Alan Dr on May 18 2021 said:
    I think the projections from BP and others are realistic because they can’t ignore the change in world the population. Since the world population is projected to peak in the 2060’s there can be nothing else that can be expected as peak oil demand (peak production is a whole other thing). The census about the Chinese population was just released last week and even though there was still some population growth, it is expected now that the Chinese population will start to decline between 2022 and 2027. It is expected that China (and many other countries) will have only half its population left at the end of the century. All future projections of oil use are related to population growth and with that GDP growth. If we ignore the population development in the world then it is impossible to see the big picture. Oil is about to get hit by a double whammy by both sales of electric cars and a changing world population (older people drive less then young people).
  • Suqi Madiqi on May 23 2021 said:
    Oil demand in the West is predicted to be stable. The other developing nations with 1.2 billion people may want to taste the honey too. As to EV's, there isn't enough cobalt or lithium to make all those very expensive and dirty batteries.

Leave a comment




EXXON Mobil -0.35
Open57.81 Trading Vol.6.96M Previous Vol.241.7B
BUY 57.15
Sell 57.00
Oilprice - The No. 1 Source for Oil & Energy News