Glances at the International Petroleum Industry
Authors: Keplinger C.H. 
Published: December 2007

The world petroleum industry faces an increasing demand which will require increasing reserves and production. Although the position of the U. S. in the world petroleum industry is declining because of the rapid growth of less sophisticated economies, the U. S. is in good shape to take part ill the expansion of the industry. Russian and Middle Eastern oil will continue to be of major importance. New areas will come to the front, once the exploration for petroleum has begun to keep pace with the increased demand. The continental shelf, deep water and deep land possibilities are becoming more important in long-range plans. Natural gas is becoming more important, although it is not being utilized elsewhere as much as in the U. S. Oil import policies will continue to evolve ill an attempt to maintain equilibrium.

Introduction

The future of the international petroleum industry, of course, will depend on the kind of world we are going to have tomorrow in respect to political and economic stability to support the expected growth in demand for petroleum. Will there be political and economic stability comparable to the past? By this I mean will we be subjected only to minor changes and no disruptions which would cause a world war. If the answer is "yes", then we may predict the growth of the international petroleum industry based on past trends and performance. The long-range forecasts of demand in this paper are a consensus of forecasts prepared by oil companies and supported by past trends. Aside from the above, the principal factors which will influence the demand for petroleum in the next 10 years are:

population growth rate; technical progress in the utilization of petroleum; growth rate of world economy; desire for better living standards throughout the world which is directly related to the per capita consumption of petroleum; and possible substitutes for petroleum from oil shales and tar sands.

Demand and Production

The future looks very bright for the petroleum industry. It appears that we have an expanding industry which will require, in the year 1975, approximately 50 million BOPD to meet demand. With this expected growth rate we will have produced more than half our present known reserves of approximately 300 billion bbl of oil by that time. It will, indeed, take considerable exploration effort to find oil to supply this ever-increasing demand. Present oversupply conditions will be erased in a few years unless there is a large amount of oil discovered. The growth in demand for crude oil and natural gas products for the last 10-year period and the next 10-year period is indicated in Table 1, which indicates that the United States demand is increasing at a much lower rate than the rest of the world and, as a result, the United States portion of total demand is diminishing. During 1953, the United States demand was 55.8 per cent of total world demand. During 1963, this had been reduced to 39 per cent, and in 1973 it is estimated that the United States demand will only be 31.9 per cent of the total world demand. This definitely shows the trend in the use of petroleum and the importance for American operators to develop crude sources outside the United States to supply this increasing demand.

U.S. and Free World

Table 2 shows the per capita consumption of crude oil and natural gas liquids for 10 countries. In Table 2, note that the barrels per year per capita consumption in the United States is 20.7, with Canada a close second at 18.4; whereas, for Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy, the per capita consumption is respectively 8.2, 6.9, 6.1 and 5.5. These countries of Europe have a very high percentage increase in demand, which can be explained by the fact that their per capita consumption is much lower than either the United States or Canada. The per capita consumption for Japan is 4.1 bbl/year and it can be expected the demand rate will rise sharply until it approaches at least double the present consumption.

Communist Bloc

In the Communist bloc the average per capita consumption is 6 bbl/year, which is approximately the average of Western Europe. In Africa and China there is room for enormous expansion in demand because the per capita consumption is very low. We believe that Table 2, in part, shows why the percentage increase in demand outside the United States is so much larger than the increase in demand in the United States. Fig. 1 shows the past trends together with the expected future trend for the next 10 years for the world, the United States and outside the United States. In addition, it shows the crude oil production of the United States and of Russia and the Russian exports.

JPT

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