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| Photograph by Zheyang Soohoo, Reuters/Corbis |
The swirl of headlights and taillights marks the traffic flow at a busy Petrol China gasoline station. Two-thirds of future growth in energy demand will come from Asia, led by both China and India.
Meanwhile, the world's thirst for oil is not slacking. Under the energy and climate policies that nations currently have in place, the IEA expects demand for oil to increase 27 percent between 2012 and 2035, to 111 million barrels a day. Fully two-thirds of that growth will come from Asia, with China in the lead.
China will remain Asia's biggest market, but "the volumetric growth in Indian demand (between 2020 and 2035) is larger than that of China," the IEA said. "India will be the engine of global demand growth," said the IEA's chief economist, Fatih Birol.
Demand will also accelerate greatly in the Middle East, which will account for 10 percent of growth in energy demand through 2035. By 2035, Middle Eastern countries will be gobbling down nearly 10 million barrels of oil a day, or about the same amount that China is consuming today.
Demand in developed countries like the United States and much of Europe will actually decrease between now and 2035, largely because of improved energy efficiencies, particularly tougher automotive fuel standards.