The verified development, on the record from the International Energy Agency, whose World Energy Outlook 2025 appeared at the COP30 summit in Brazil in November 2025: the world’s fossil-fuel use is still projected to peak before 2030, with coal at or close to a peak, oil following around 2030 and gas by 2035, if governments do what they have stated. That the peak question survives a period of surging political support for coal, oil and gas is the strategic backdrop to the whole peak-oil debate. When demand stops growing is no longer a geological question; it is a policy variable, and the modelers say so themselves, noting that “none of [these scenarios] should be regarded as a forecast”.
The institutions, for the record, do not agree. The IEA’s 2023 outlook saw oil demand peaking at 102 million barrels per day before 2030; OPEC’s World Oil Outlook, published the same season, put global demand at 116 mb/d in 2045, a difference of interpretation worth nearly a decade and a half of growth. Actual consumption ran at 101.7 mb/d in 2023, with more than 60% of it burned by the transportation sector, which is precisely where the challenge to demand is building.
The mechanism, laid out in a shipping-industry analysis of EV adoption, is easy to miss because it is not where the cameras point. Passenger cars used 24.3 mb/d in 2022 and commercial trucks 16.2, but the quiet actor is the world’s 1.12 billion two- and three-wheelers, whose rapid electrification by itself cut global oil demand by an estimated 1 mb/d in 2023; add electric and hydrogen buses and the displacement passed 1.3 mb/d. The electric two-wheeler market is projected to grow 8.7% a year through 2029 to $218 billion, and India’s bus fleet, 2.3 million vehicles, is the next domino: a $2.4 billion subsidy round announced in August 2023 targeted 10,000 electric buses across 169 cities, with plans to swap out as many as 800,000 diesel buses by 2030. On the IEA’s adoption-trend projection, EVs could displace 5 mb/d of oil by 2030 and, by 2040, as much as 20 mb/d, roughly a fifth of today’s demand, with battery prices down 14% in 2023 making the arithmetic friendlier each year.
Inside the 2025 outlook sits a fight over assumptions. After pressure from the Trump administration, in a country that accounts for 14% of the agency’s budget, the IEA resurrected its “current policies scenario”, a pathway in which governments abandon stated intentions and keep only legislated policy; on that road, warming reaches 2.9C by 2100 and oil and gas demand keep rising. Politico reported “a ratcheted-up US pressure campaign” and “months of public frustrations with the IEA from top Trump administration officials”, on the complaint that the agency’s peak-demand analyses discourage fossil investment. The scenario, the IEA notes, assumes countries fail at plans they have announced, from Japan and South Korea’s electricity plans to China’s market reforms to EU coal phase-outs. Its stated-policies case, which it calls “a mirror to the plans of today’s policymakers”, is no free pass either: aspirational targets are not assumed to be met.
The record shows how fast this forecast itself moves. In 2020 the agency called a structural decline in coal but said it was too soon for oil or gas; in 2021 it saw a plateau from the late 2020s; in 2022 it said the energy crisis after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “turbo-charged” the shift away from fossil fuels, with coal peaking “within a few years”, oil “in the mid-2030s” and gas “by the end of the decade”; by 2024 all three peaks landed before 2030. The 2025 edition then nudged the near term back toward fossil fuels, revising coal up around 6%, softening oil’s post-peak decline and letting gas plateau higher, while still seeing renewables overtake oil as the world’s largest energy source, not just electricity, by the early 2040s, on costs for solar, wind and batteries down respectively 90%, 70% and 90% since 2010.
The sober summary for anyone holding barrels: demand growth’s end date is now the product of subsidy schedules, bus procurements and scenario authors’ judgment calls, moved by politics in both directions, from Washington’s pressure to Beijing’s two-wheeler chargers. Esso’s 1959 driver was told to “put a tiger in your tank”; the 2030s driver increasingly plugs the tiger in. For economies financed by the barrel, the operative question is not whether the peak comes but which of the IEA’s scenarios turns out to have been the news.
Sources
- Electric-Vehicles-Affect-Global-Oil-Demand | Sea and Job
- IEA: Fossil-fuel use will peak before 2030 – unless ‘stated policies’ are abandoned – Carbon Brief
