OPEC says $160-a-barrel oil by 2035
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries raised its forecasts for its crude-oil basket price and long-term world oil demand growth, according to the latest annual World Oil Outlook report.
The report from OPEC, which provides a view on the world oil market from 2010 to 2035, said oil prices CLZ3 are forecast to "remain stable in the long run," though its estimates are a bit higher than last year`s report. OPEC said it expects its nominal OPEC Reference Basket price (ORB) to average $110 a barrel over the period to 2020 and then rise to $160 by 2035.
In its 2012 report, OPEC had said it assumed that the ORB nominal price would average $100 a barrel over the medium term before rising with inflation to reach $120 by 2025 and $155 by 2035. The ORB is made up of a dozen different types of crude oils.
For the medium-term period of 2012-2018, demand is expected to increase by an average of 0.9 million barrels per day annually, reaching 94.4 million barrels per day by 2018, OPEC`s latest report said. In last year`s report, it projected that by the year 2016, demand would reach 92.9 million barrels a day.
For the long-term, it expects demand to rise by nearly 20 million barrels per day for the 2012-2035 period to 108.5 million barrels per day by 2035. That`s up from its previous forecast for demand of 107.3 million barrels per day by 2035.
The demand increase represents the first upward revision in oil-demand growth since the World Oil Outlook (WOO) was first published, according to OPEC.
"This year`s WOO demonstrates again that there is no shortage of oil and resources are plentiful," it said. "Increasing global oil demand is supported by an expanding diversity of supply sources: crude oil including tight oil, NGLs [natural-gas liquids], oil sands gas- and coal-to-liquids and biofuels."