Asia’s oil consumption at record high while production peaked in 2010
The annual BP Statistical Review has come out, as usual in June. In this post we focus on the Asia Pacific region. This is important because the Australian government has offered the help of “Team Australia” to build the “Asian Century”. The question no one asks (or wants to ask) is how much oil there is to carry Asia through the decades to come. No one can give an answer of course but it is clear that if past oil consumption and production trends continue the region will slide into a huge oil crisis.
Overview
Oil production in the Asia Pacific peaked in 2010 (China offshore!) at 8.4 mb/d while consumption continued to increase to 30.9 mb/d.
Fig 1: Asia-Pacific oil production and consumption
The difference between consumption and production (net imports) is now 73% of consumption, up from 68% ten years ago.
Oil consumption changes
Let’s zoom into the last 10 years. Consumption growth dropped from 6.2% in 2009/10 to 1.5% in 2013/2014 but this is still an annual 440 kb/d. If this reduced consumption growth were to continue an extra 2.2 mb/d would be needed by 2020 and 4.4 mb/d by 2025.
Fig 2: Asia’s oil production and consumption changes since 2005
Since global crude oil production started to peak in 2005 (base year in above graph), Asia did remarkably well to suck additional oil out of the global market, around 6 mb/d
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