The International Energy Agency has revised its 2025 oil demand estimate upward again, marking the fourth straight year its historical figures have climbed instead of fallen.
The IEA updates its historical demand estimates every August alongside its Annual Statistical Supplement. This year’s revision puts 2025 global oil consumption at 104.8 million barrels a day, 1.1 million barrels higher than the agency projected a year ago. Each year’s revision has grown since 2022, up from 0.4 million barrels a day that year, according to a chart published by Bloomberg Opinion‘s Javier Blas. Before that, the agency’s revisions had gone the other way for more than a decade, consistently coming in below what it had projected.
The IEA made a similarly sized correction in February 2022 that moved markets, adding almost 800,000 barrels a day to its historical demand figures once it accounted for previously undercounted petrochemical use in China and Saudi Arabia dating to 2007, telling Reuters at the time that the update left its balances “more in line with observed market fundamentals.”
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The change turned an apparent 2021 supply-demand balance into a 2.1 million barrel-a-day deficit.
IEA’s May 2025 report made a similar correction for a narrower window, revising world oil consumption up by 0.26 million barrels a day for 2022, 0.33 million for 2023 and 0.35 million for 2024, according to OPEC’s own analysis of the change. The revisions were large enough to flip the three-year balance from an apparent surplus to a deficit.
The IEA also cut its 2026 demand forecast this month, projecting a decline of 1.6 million barrels a day as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and fuel prices stay elevated.
