TPT January 2008
Oil & Gas News
slowdown. As reported by James Kanter in the International Herald Tribune , this unusually stark warning about the effect of Asia’s emerging giants was issued by Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA). The annual World Energy Outlook published by the IEA is considered the leading source for medium- to long-term energy market projections. Mr Birol was interviewed at an oil industry conference in London, sponsored in part by the Herald Tribune , in advance of publication of the 2007 edition: “China and India Insights” (“Energy Expert Sees Hazard in Costly Oil.” November 1). “China plus India are going to dominate growth in the oil markets,” Mr Birol declared. Over the previous 18 months, he noted, more than two-thirds of the growth in global oil demand came from these two countries alone. Demand for oil in China, he added, would eventually equal the entire supply from Saudi Arabia. As a partial consequence of this, the IEA annual report would project oil prices that could hit levels much higher than once thought possible, heightening the risk of a serious global economic slowdown. “We may see very high prices that will come to a level where the wheels may fall off,” Mr Birol said . “I definitely believe that if prices stay at these levels, there will be a slowdown of the global economy.” Mr Birol said that China and India could help ameliorate the environmental impact of their booming energy consumption by introducing greater efficiencies, building up renewable sources of energy, using more nuclear power, and by cutting emissions. The Paris-based IEA was founded by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) following the oil crisis of that period. The mission of the 24-member intergovernmental agency is to prevent disruptions in the supply of oil, as well as collecting and distributing information on energy markets. The president of Turkmenistan finds a warm welcome in the US In September, on his first visit to the United States, President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov of the former Soviet republic Turkmenistan received an extraordinary amount of attention, even for a chief of state. His visit was the first to the US by a Turkmen president since 1998, and included a meeting September 25 with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. American officials were seizing what they saw as an opportunity to dilute the influence of Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy monopoly, which provides nearly a quarter of the Europe’s gas supply. The assiduous courtship of Mr Berdymukhammedov was in marked contrast to the bitter invective that greeted another president – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of Iran – in New York for the same meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. US officials seemed determined to make the Turkmen leader understand he has options beyond Gazprom for developing, selling, and shipping his country’s natural gas. Right now, those options are largely hypothetical. Reserves in Turkmenistan’s sector of the Caspian Sea could be shipped westward through an undersea pipeline to Turkey – provided that the formidable legal and economic obstacles to the building of the
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