Newswire – Oil prices may decline further this year as new production swells and demand remains capped by China’s faltering growth, the head of the International Energy Agency said.
International Energy Administration’s Executive Director Fatih Birol
While crude futures have recovered over the past two weeks to trade near $68 a barrel on London, they remain roughly 9% below levels traded before U.S. President Donald Trump announced a blizzard of tariffs on China and other nations on April 2.
The IEA sees “slow demand growth in the markets, mainly driven by what is happening in China,” Executive Director Fatih Birol said in an interview with Bloomberg television. “If there are no other surprises, we may expect oil prices to see a downward pressure further.”
There’s still lots of uncertainty and a “change in the trade war’s context in a positive direction may increase the global economic outlook, and we may see oil demand slightly higher than what we have now,” Birol said. It’s also hard to predict a direction for Iran’s oil exports amid the country’s talks with the Trump administration, he said.
Birol is visiting London as the IEA and the UK government convene a two-day summit of more than 60 countries and numerous companies to discuss the future of energy security. The Paris-based agency was founded by the US and other oil—importing nations in the 1970s to monitor energy issues.
Last year, the IEA — which has predicted that global oil demand will stop growing this decade — drew criticism from some U.S. Republican lawmakers, who accused the agency of focusing on the transition to clean energy at the expense of its core mandate on supply security.
Birol said the agency works with the Trump administration and other member nations “in a respectful way,” and that it continues to forecast that oil demand growth will “slow down considerably in the next years to come” as the world shifts to electric cars and renewable fuels.
*Grant Smith and Francine Lacqua – Bloomberg
