India's Upside for Oil Demand Seems Unlimited
https://www.rigzone.com/news/indias_upside_for_oil_demand_seems_unlimited-13-feb-2020-161082-article/February 13, 2020
With almost 1.4 billion people, India remains the most energy-deprived nation on Earth. The upside for demand seems almost unlimited. India has 635 million people under the age of 24. This is a burgeoning young population the size of the total populations of the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, and Canada. Coal will remain the main source of energy, but the proven global reality that demand mounts as human development progresses makes India’s oil usage unidirectional: up.
Today, oil accounts for 25 percent of India’s total energy demand, rather high for a still developing country. The latent demand, however, is just staggering. Indians use less than 0.2 gallons of oil products per day, versus 2.6 gallons for the U.S. Even though it has almost 11 times more people, India overtook Japan only in 2015 to become the world’s third largest oil consumer after the U.S. and China.
Over the past decade, China (45 percent) and India (20 percent) have accounted for the bulk of new global oil demand. Driven by more diesel fuel, gasoline, and LPG, India could race past China to become the world’s primary new consumer within five or seven years. For those claiming “the end of oil,†the truth is that the world’s most vital fuel has no material substitute whatsoever. Electric transport, for instance, is overly expensive here in the rich U.S., let alone for a still developing country where 70 percent of the people subsist on biomass. Dreaming of the same luxuries that Westerners enjoy, gas-guzzling SUVs now comprise 35 percent of all car sales in India....
