The IEA's 113 million barrels a day figure is one scenario of four, not a 2050 forecast

One number from the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2025, published on 12 November 2025 during the opening days of COP30, travelled further than any other: oil demand reaching 113 million barrels a day by 2050, around 13 per cent above 2024 consumption. Reuters reported it that day under the headline that world oil and gas demand could grow until 2050. OPEC posted that it hoped the world had "passed the peak in the misguided notion of 'peak oil'". The figure is real and it is in the report. It is also the output of exactly one of the report's four scenarios, and the IEA states in the same document that none of them is a forecast.

The 113 mb/d figure belongs to the Current Policies Scenario, or CPS, which the IEA describes as anchored in enacted laws and measures. Its own chapter also records that global gas demand reaches 5,600 billion cubic metres by 2050 on this path, that energy-related CO2 emissions approach 40 gigatonnes a year in the early 2030s and stay near that level to 2050, and that the resulting warming is around 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100.

The agency published a commentary on 5 November 2025, a week before the report, warning against the obvious misreading. Written by Laura Cozzi, the IEA's director for sustainability, technology and outlooks, and chief energy economist Tim Gould, it says the CPS "might seem like a 'business as usual' scenario, but this terminology can be misleading in an energy system where new technologies are already being deployed at scale". The commentary sets out the mechanism precisely: where a policy is time-bound, the CPS assumes it continues past its end date but is never strengthened, while the Stated Policies Scenario assumes it keeps improving at the previous rate. Japan's vehicle efficiency standard is the worked example. Both scenarios reach roughly 4 litres per 100 km in 2030. After that the CPS holds Japanese new cars at that level until 2050, while STEPS carries them to around 3 litres.

The second exploratory scenario produces a different headline number from the same data. In STEPS, oil demand peaks at 102 mb/d around 2030 before gradually declining, coal peaks before 2030, gas demand rises for about a decade then levels off, and warming reaches around 2.5 degrees by 2100, up marginally from 2.4 degrees in the 2024 edition.

The CPS had been dropped after the 2020 outlook. Carbon Brief, reporting on 12 November 2025, attributed its return to pressure from the United States, which funds 14 per cent of the IEA's budget, and noted that the CPS appears first in the report's scenario chapters and first in Annex A, the data tables. Reuters recorded that US energy secretary Chris Wright had called the agency's peak-demand projections "nonsensical", and that IEA head Fatih Birol said on a press call the scenario was restored to reflect the differing choices governments are making. Carbon Brief's own count of mentions per 100 pages found STEPS still slightly ahead of the CPS in the text.

Sources disagree sharply about what the CPS represents. US critics quoted by Carbon Brief describe it as the likely business-as-usual case and the stated policies scenario as disconnected from reality. The International Institute for Sustainable Development, in an explainer published on 20 November 2025, argued the opposite: that the CPS "despite the name is more pessimistic than business as usual, as it assumes technological progress stalls and governments do not deliver their policies". IISD also drew out the price consequence, which received far less coverage than the demand number. Oil averages USD 104 a barrel in 2050 in the CPS, against USD 76 in STEPS and USD 25 in the net zero pathway, making the fossil-heavy scenario the most expensive of the set. Even inside the CPS, the IEA has coal falling to a fifth below current levels by 2050 and renewables becoming the world's largest single energy source before mid-century.

Australia's own numbers do not settle the argument, because they stop before it starts. The Office of the Chief Economist's Resources and Energy Quarterly for June 2026, published on 3 July 2026, forecasts resource and energy export earnings of about $405 billion in 2025 to 2026 and $416 billion in 2026 to 2027, falling to $371 billion by 2030 to 2031. Thermal coal exports are forecast to slide gradually from 209 million tonnes in 2025 to 197 million tonnes in 2031. That is a five-year horizon. It ends almost exactly where the IEA's two exploratory scenarios begin to separate.

What is not yet known is whether the Announced Pledges Scenario, omitted from WEO 2025 because too many countries had missed their deadlines for 2031 to 2035 climate targets, will return and where it lands between the two. Nor is it known whether the CPS will remain in the 2026 outlook, or whether the roughly 65 billion cubic metre gas surplus the IEA projects for 2030 will arrive on schedule.