India, China make competition for oil intense

Demand growth in China and India makes the competition for available oil resources more intense, as oil demand growth in these countries will be over half the growth in global demand between 2025 and 2050, experts at a conference here said.

According to panelists at the 16th Annual Energy Conference organised by the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR), this demand will spread to all other forms of energy and will have enormous impact on markets for exportable oil.

These nations will depend on imports for three quarters of their consumption by 2035, by which time the US, Japan, OECD Europe, China and India will need imports of over 40 mbpd, a 25 per cent increase from 2005.

There will be insufficient oil to satisfy global needs by then. This will make the competition to secure oil supplies extremely intense.

The US and China are in growing competition, usually involving transfers of military equipment and development funds to cement the supplier-consumer relationship, they added.

These supplies are often costly to develop, but the desperation of international oil companies forces them to pursue ever more expensive supplies, including unconventional sources.

Energy scarcity must be dealt with and the fact that one quarter of the world's population lacks access to electricity is a geopolitical time-bomb, they concluded.

Outlook and Challenges was the focus on the second day of the conference.

 Arne Walther, former Secretary General of the International Energy Forum (IEF), said concerns about the geopolitics of oil stemmed from the fact that governments need oil as a means to propel economic and social development, and citizens of oil exporting states expect their governments to pass on the benefits of resource extraction.

"Investment in energy production must be made during times of abundance. Competition for energy resources among consumers will increase, as will competition among producers of different types of energy," he added.