The International Energy Agency revealed that the world needs to spend around $540 billion annually on oil and gas to maintain current production by 2050, as decline rates in existing fields accelerate.
The agency’s Executive Director, Fatih Birol, explained that “rapid decline rates, partly due to increased global reliance on U.S. shale oil, mean that the global oil and gas industry will need to work much faster just to hold on.”
Projections show that companies will need to exploit yet-to-be-discovered reserves—unless demand shifts away from fossil fuels—to maintain production at its current level over the next 25 years. These forecasts also mark a major shift in the IEA’s approach, which in recent years had urged major producers to invest more in clean energy.
