The International Energy Agency’s 2025 World Energy Outlook, which will be published on November 12, is a critical resource utilized by policymakers, oil and natural gas producers, and investors for insight into energy supply, future demand, and energy security.

The 2025 WEO is of particular importance as its release coincides with a period of heightened geopolitical tension and the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence. This year’s report may also be a return to form for the IEA, which took a detour in recent years to become an “energy transition cheerleader.”

Here’s what to watch out for this week:

Current Policies Scenario Is Back

In 2019, IEA quietly ceased publishing its Current Policies Scenario, which provides a “baseline” estimate of future oil and natural gas demand based on current laws and market trends, and focused instead on overly optimistic scenarios favoring renewable energy and electric vehicle growth.

In a press release announcing the 2025 WEO, IEA has a curious explanation for this controversial move:

“The CPS was a regular feature of the International Energy Agency’s suite of scenarios until the WEO-2020, when it was discontinued amid turmoil in energy markets and rapid changes in the policy landscape during the Covid‑19 pandemic.”

Ironically, IEA was founded half a century ago in response to the need for reliable oil markets data and supply security in response to the 1973 oil crisis. It turns out, investors, governments, and companies are most in need of a reliable, base-case oil and gas demand forecast “amid turmoil in energy markets.”

Consequently, IEA’s decision to cease publishing a baseline forecast was met with widespread opposition from energy stakeholders, spanning members of Congress, the Trump Administration, energy markets experts, and energy leaders in developing countries.

These groups argued that CPS is critical because it allows policymakers and investors to model future oil and natural gas supply based on present-day reality. IEA’s additional scenarios, which model a range of changes in the energy landscape, are only useful if they can be compared against a baseline.

It’s worth pointing out that previous CPS estimates of future demand tracked closely to other leading forecasters’ estimates, and in some cases, CPS short- and mid-term estimates mapped closely to real-life oil demand:

Source: IEA WEO reports 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2024

It’s clear that CPS is a valuable tool for policymakers, energy companies, investors, and analysts. While IEA’s decision to reinstate CPS in the 2025 WEO is a good first step, the agency still has a long way to go to regain credibility as a neutral forecaster.

WEO Scenarios to Reflect “Direction of Travel”

IEA’s scenarios inherently reflect certain assumptions that may increase or reduce demand for oil and natural gas in the future. As IEA writes in its press release announcing the 2025 WEO:

“There are many factors in a complex energy system that affect the direction of travel, including macroeconomic and financial conditions, investor strategies, innovation and technology progress, consumer preferences, and broader geopolitical factors. Capturing all this complexity is a daunting task for any forward-looking Outlook, but these factors all feature in the design and presentation of our scenarios.”

In previous years, particularly after IEA stopped reporting the CPS scenario, IEA’s preferred “direction of travel” was clearly in favor of renewable energy. The scenarios IEA used in lieu of CPS assumed adoption of a range of climate policies, from electric vehicle uptake to individual countries’ commitments under the Paris Agreement.

However, there are many factors today that suggest the “direction of travel” for future oil and natural gas production is strong:

• Additional Russian sanctions – Further sanctions on Russian oil and natural gas will tighten supply and make American gas exports even more critical. Countries dependent on Russian gas are turning to the United States and Qatar to supplant Russian supply “thanks to booming projects” in these countries, as Reuters reports.
• AI and data center growth – Natural gas has become the go-to solution for many hyperscale projects. Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR) estimates that by 2030, power demand for AI and data centers will increase by 14 GW, or 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas use if serviced by gas-fired generation.
• Developing economies – Since 2024, natural gas demand has seen considerable growth, with a rise of 7 percent globally. Emerging markets have been a key driver behind this increase. As Energy In Depth has previously discussed, the IEA’s 2025 Global Energy Review highlights how developing economies, particularly Brazil and Colombia, have become progressively more reliant on gas-fired power generation – a trend that will only continue to grow.

We’ll be on the lookout for how IEA factors these dynamics into its 2025 WEO.

Is “Peak Oil” Over?

In the last few years, IEA has repeatedly estimated oil demand will peak before 2030 – years before Goldman Sachs and Wood Mackenzie, and decades before OPEC estimate oil to plateau.

But on the flip side, the agency has continuously revised near-term oil demand forecasts upwards, while talking out of both sides of its mouth on the issue of new oil and natural gas infrastructure investment.

Writing for OilPrice, Irina Slav argued that IEA’s use of hypothetical scenarios in place of CPS is partially to blame for its inconsistent statements on the future of oil demand:

“This may go a rather long way towards explaining why the International Energy Agency has had to revise its oil demand projections time and again, and why it suffered an embarrassing U-turn in 2021 when it released its Road Map to Net Zero. In it, the IEA assumed no new oil and gas exploration would be necessary beyond that year – only to call for more exploration several months later as oil supply tightened and prices rose.”

It appears that IEA is poised to adjust its “peak oil” forecast yet again – now by two decades. Bloomberg energy columnist Javier Blas reviewed an advance copy of IEA’s 2025 WEO and reported that ‘under current policies, “oil and natural gas use rise out to 2050.’”

The IEA’s 2025 WEO would be smart to leave the peak oil debate behind and instead let the data speak for itself.

Bottom Line: The IEA’s World Energy Outlook continues to serve as an insightful, trusted source of information related to all things energy. With that said, it is crucial that the IEA’s scenarios align with its forecasts, especially during a time when policy has a powerful hold on the industry’s global oil supply and energy demand needs.