WORLD NEWS: "World Need for Oil Expected to Ease: International Energy Agency Says Conservation Efforts Will Trump Any Global Economic Recovery," by Spencer Swartz, Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2009.

More amazing news: the International Energy Agency is substantially revising--downward--its long-term forecast for global oil demand, for the second year in a row.

The forecast of slower growth in oil demand puts the IEA increasingly in a camp of contrarians bucking the popular view that crude demand will grow briskly in a postrecession world. That view holds that long-term demand will grow at a fast-clip because of rising emerging-market wealth and consumption in places like China and India.

The key change is not the perception of the recession's impact but the "demand management policies" (aka, conservation) of advanced economies, which still account for about 55% of world use.

Daniel Yergin's projection: a future of much more subdued consumption growth than popularly anticipated. Why? Consumers remember the sting of the recent run-up in prices, fear future MidEast instability, and are becoming more sensitive to climate change worries.

Yergin's company, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, says that Old Core oil demand peaked in 2005 and that it will happen for the world at large sometime around 2030.

It has been my running assumption for years now (going back to the energy game I ran with Cantor Fitzgerald in 2000, which CERA attended) that global oil demand will peak before global oil production--primarily for cost and pollution reasons (cost in the Old Core, pollution in the New Core). Meanwhile, technology will continue to advance . . . as we move down the hydrocarbon chain.