Veteran energy experts find 23 problematic assumptions within IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2024

WASHINGTON, January 30, 2025 — Industry players consider the International Energy Agency’s signature annual report, the World Energy Outlook, to contain highly credible analyses. However, a new critique from the National Center of Energy Analytics experts finds the IEA’s latest scenarios on future oil demand to be problematic and potentially, dangerously wrong. 

“When it comes to policy or investment planning, there is a distinction with a critical difference when it comes to what constitutes a “forecast” (what is likely to happen) versus a “scenario” (a possibility based on assumptions). The challenge is not in determining whether the scenarios are completely factual per se, but instead whether they are factually complete,” wrote the authors in their report.

The most widely reported WEO scenario is that the world will see peak oil demand by the early 2030s. NCEA co-authors Mark P. Mills and Neil Atkinson believe that this conclusion is a prima facie case; minimally, the IEA should include business as usual (BAU) scenarios, not those based on all “high cases” or unrealistic possibilities.

Mills and Atkinson pinpoint 23 flawed assumptions used in the WEO scenarios to predict future oil demand, including:

• IEA’s assumption: Corporate transition policies are real and durable. NCEA’s counterclaim: Myriad corporations, having earlier proclaimed fealty to “energy-transition” goals, are either failing to meet such pledges or overtly rescinding them.
• IEA’s assumption: Transition financing will continue to expand. NCEA’s counterclaim: Alternative energy projects have become more expensive and difficult to finance, and wealthy nations are increasingly reluctant to gift huge amounts of money to the faster-growing but poorer nations, many of which have governance issues.
• IEA’s assumption: China’s actions will follow its pledges. NCEA’s counterclaim: The scale of China’s role in present and future energy and oil markets requires scenarios that model what China is doing—and will likely do—rather than what China claims or promises.
• IEA’s assumption: The oil growth in emerging markets will be low. NCEA’s counterclaim: The fact of low demand in some poorer regions—e.g., Africa uses roughly one-tenth the per-capita level in OECD countries—points to the potential for very high, not low, growth in those markets.
• IEA’s assumption: Governments will stay the course on EV mandates. NCEA’s counterclaim: Recent trends in many countries and U.S. states show policymakers weakening or reducing mandates and subsidies.

While the NCEA paper focuses on the implications regarding the WEO claim of near-term peak oil demand, it also points to similar flaws in forecasts about electricity demand and supply.

The paper, “Energy Delusions: Peak Oil Forecasts,” is available at delusions.energyanalytics.org.