The world is rapidly approaching a crucial turning point in its energy consumption, with global demand for key fossil fuels, particularly oil and coal, expected to reach a peak around 2030, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) flagship publication, the World Energy Outlook 2025. This pivotal moment is outlined in the IEA’s more transition-friendly “Stated Policies Scenario” (STEPS), which tracks energy trends based on government policies already adopted or put forward, even if not yet fully enacted into law.
That being said, the IEA brought back what it calls a “Current Policies Scenario,” with a vastly different outcome. The so-called CPS, on hiatus for 5 years, projects that fossil-fuel consumption will rise by 13% by 2050. This hinges on a slower pace of electric vehicle adoption and assumes that countries will not keep their promises to curb fossil fuel consumption. Last year, the IEA projected oil demand would either plateau or decline in the 2020s across its scenarios. IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol told both Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal that the CPS needed to come back because of the many uncertainties in the current policy climate, including the U.S. embrace of oil, gas, and coal under President Trump. “The main reason we have two new scenarios is the growing uncertainties in the political, economy and energy context.”
