The United States will become the undisputed leader of global oil and gas production in the longer term, Fatih Birol, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), said at a press conference on the sidelines of a UN Climate Change conference in Germany on Thursday.
The oil market will balance next year, but looking beyond the next few quarters, in the next ten years, more than 80 percent of the global oil production growth will come from the U.S., Birol said.
Not only will the U.S. lead in new oil supply, but American natural gas production "will be 30 percent higher than Russia" in ten years, the IEA's head said.
The U.S. becoming the undisputed leader of global oil and gas production will have implications on oil markets, prices, trade flows, investment trends, and geopolitics of energy, Birol said in Bonn today.
Earlier this week, the IEA said in its WEO that the 8 million bpd increase in tight oil production between 2010 and 2025 "would match the highest sustained period of oil output growth by a single country in the history of the oil markets."
The IEA also noted that the era of oil is not over yet, and said:
"With the United States accounting for 80 percent of the increase in global oil supply to 2025 and maintaining near-term downward pressure on prices, the world's consumers are not yet ready to say goodbye to the era of oil."
It's not only the IEA that expects U.S. oil production to continue to increase over the next decade. None other than OPEC-the rival producer bloc that tried to drive U.S. shale out of profitability by flooding the market with oil and contributing to the plunge in oil prices-admitted last week that American oil production will rise much faster than previously expected.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More