Saudi minister says peak oil demand talk misguided

Demand for petroleum imports will continue to grow steadily in developing countries like India as neither climate change policies nor technology shifts have quenched their insatiable thirst for oil, a top Saudi minister has said.
"Whether I'm in China, India, Indonesia or Malaysia, as I was last week, I find that neither climate change policies nor technology shifts have quenched their insatiable thirst for oil. Indeed, demand for petroleum imports will continue to grow steadily in the developing world, especially with the decline in their indigenous oil and gas production," Saudi Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih told an international energy meeting here this week.

"Therefore, I am concerned that misguided projections of peak demand and stranded petroleum resources may discourage the trillions of dollars in investments needed to underpin essential oil and gas supplies, during the long transformation of our global energy system," he said.
Al-Falih said the risks of underinvestment driven by such theories amount to nothing less than compromising the world's energy security by squandering staggering quantities of Earth's natural energy endowment.
"That in turn would create heightened market volatility including damaging price spikes, and more acute energy poverty in the developing world," he warned.
The minister said that for some time he has been concerned about worldwide investments falling behind supply development needs.