BAKU, Azerbaijan, Feb.14. The demand for natural gas is affected by two contradictory trends, meaning growing demand in emerging economies and clean energy trend in the developed markets, Trend reports with reference to bp’s 2023 energy outlook.
The extent to which those two factors affect the natural gas demand depends on the energy transition pace.
The New Momentum and Accelerated scenarios suggest that the global gas demand will be growing over the rest of this decade backed up by the economic growth in China amid the coal-to-gas switching trends, as well as in India and other emerging Asian countries against the backdrop of their industrialization.
This is while in Net Zero scenario the natural gas consumption peaks in mid-2020s.
In Accelerated and Net Zero scenarios, the natural gas demand falls starting from 2030s, as electrification and switch to renewables accelerates in China and the Middle East. On the other hand, the increasing use of natural gas for blue hydrogen production makes a bullish effect.
Global natural gas demand will fall by 40 percent by 2050 as compared to 2019 in Accelerated and 55 percent lower in Net Zero. This is while in the New Momentum scenario, the demand for natural gas keeps on rising for much of the period out to 2050 amid the growing use in emerging Asia and Africa. The major part of this growth accounts for the power sector, as the share of natural gas consumption in power generation in these regions is going up.
“The range of the difference in global gas demand in 2050 across the three scenarios relative to current levels is greater than for either oil or coal, highlighting the sensitivity of natural gas to the speed of the energy transition,” says bp.
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