Future Outlook of Petroleum in the World

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Introduction The decade since World War II has, in many ways, been one of the most eventful periods of world history. For one thing, the pattern of industrial and political development predicted at the end of World War II is quite different from that which has actually evolved. Many thoughtful people believed that we were close to attaining real world peace and that we would experience the historical pattern of an economic recession following a great war. Of course, neither of these estimates has proved to be correct. The world has suffered several minor wars, that is, minor compared to the World Wars, and certainly there are conditions and forces throughout the world today that constitute a real threat to peace. On the economic side, the forecasters of a major recession have proved to be especially incorrect. There has never been a similar period of time in world history in which economic growth has approach that of these past 10 years. In the forefront of this phenomenal growth has been a tremendous increase in demand for petroleum products. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to describe this increase in demand, explain how the world oil industry has met the challenge, and speculate a bit about the industry's future. The Growth in Demand for Petroleum Products Fig. 1 is a bar-graph on which the consumption of petroleum products by geographic areas for the first year following World War II (1946) is compared with that of 1955. The total world demand has more than doubled in this short period-from 7.8 million B/D (2.84 billion bbl per year) in 1946 to 16.1 million B/D (5.86 billion bbl per year) in 1955. You will notice that, although the United States continues to be the principal market for petroleum products, its rate of increased demand has not been nearly as great as that of other areas, particularly Europe. Another interesting comparison between 1946 and 1955 is the relative demand for the principal products produced from petroleum. Fig. 2 provides a comparison of the world's consumption of gasoline, kerosene, distillate fuel, and residual fuel for 1946 and 1955 in the free world. The greatest increase in demand has been for gasoline and distillate fuels.