“Natural Gas Demand May Peak Around 2040”

One of the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporters, Qatar, expects global natural gas demand to peak at some point around 2040, Bloomberg reported on Monday, quoting a bond prospectus of Qatar Petroleum it had seen.

According to Qatar’s state-owned giant, worldwide natural gas demand still has two decades to grow, unlike the International Energy Agency (IEA), which warned in its Net Zero by 2050 report last month that in a scenario of net-zero emissions by 2050, the world doesn’t need any new oil and gas field developments beyond those sanctioned this year.

According to the IEA net-zero vision, natural gas would need to peak around the mid-2020s and fall by more than 5 percent per year on average in the 2030s. Demand is then set to slow the decline in the 2040s because more than half of natural gas globally in 2050 would be used to produce hydrogen with carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS). This net-zero scenario would also mean that LNG trade would drop by 60 percent between 2020 and 2050, and gas carried by pipelines would fall by 65 percent, according to the agency.

However, the IEA’s Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS) scenario—examining the consequences of existing and stated policies for the energy sector—sees natural gas demand rising from 3,900 billion cubic meters (bcm) in 2020 to 4,600 bcm in 2030 and 5,700 bcm in 2050.