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Oil Prices & Oil Demand

The IEA provided some interesting data last week (its mostly boring stuff with some interesting "nuggets").  First, the IEA doesn't see a marked reduction on global energy demand -- so oil prices so stay "stable" assume that America doesn't declare war on Iran (that little spat could end badly -- very easily).   Now what every one knows now the non-OECD countries (e.g. the non-rich world) accounts for 50% of all oil demand but overall energy demand by non-OECD countries already (in BTU terms) already exceeds that of the OECD countries (55% for those interested), and demand in those countries unchanged growing by 5% per annum, while OECD countries oil consumption for OECD countries is largely unchanged for the past 25 years.


As far as the IEA is concerned its see's no significant reduction in energy demand for 2012/2013 period (despite the risk or recession in Europe and America), as any contraction in demand by OECD countries will be more than made up by increase in demand by non-OECD countries.  Over the past 15 years demand from non-OECD has been rising at 5% p.a. whereas OECD demand has been declining over the past 5 years.  

For Canada, and the CAD, clearly the strength of oil demand will support pricing of around $105/bbl (which by the way is the average "import" price in 2011 for the U.S. -- it says something about the irrelevance of the WTI price (currently around $85/bbl).  Canada is not a petro-economy, but its currency is!

Although we expect short term weakness in the CAD (it could easily hit the 92/1.08 range) most forecaster take the view (and why should I disagree) that parity with the USD is a given.

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