BP Forecast for EU Energy: What will happen for oil, coal and gas from Russia?

BP Energy Outlook 2020 contains three scenarios to 2050. DW analyzed them from the point of view of the prospects for the export of Russian energy resources to the EU, their main sales market. BP presented its next annual forecast for the development of the world energy. The peculiarity of Energy Outlook 2020 is that this time analysts of the British energy company tried to look into the future not twenty, but thirty years at once - until 2050. The Russian media paid a lot of attention to this publication, but focused mainly on the global oil market, with many articles in one form or another taking over the headline of the TASS report: "BP predicts the end of the era of growth in oil demand." DW decided to talk about what changes BP specialists expect on the EU energy market and analyze the possible consequences of the three scenarios presented for Russia, the main supplier of oil, gas and coal to the EU. The fight against CO2 emissions will fundamentally change the global market BP Energy Outlook 2020 assumes that global energy demand will increase, primarily due to the growth of prosperity in developing countries and the further increase in the role of electricity. At the same time, in the European Union, according to all three scenarios, energy consumption will decrease, and significantly. The authors explain this, first of all, by the ambitious plans of the EU to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and industrial enterprises. This runs counter to various Russian forecasts of growth in demand for energy resources in Europe, which, in particular, justify the need for the Nord Stream 2 and Turkish Stream gas pipelines. The world has taken a course to reduce CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, BP specialists have no doubts about this, and therefore they are waiting for fundamental changes in the global energy system. The role of fossil hydrocarbon energy carriers in the process of decarbonization throughout the world will decline in favor of renewable energy sources (RES). It is this segment that will grow at the fastest pace on the planet in the next 30 years. In all three scenarios, the share of RES in the structure of primary energy consumption will invariably be the highest on the planet in the European Union. This share may reach 39%, 58% or 63% by 2050. Wind energy will be of the greatest importance in the EU, according to all three scenarios. The two scenarios assume comparable solar growth rates. Oil demand in Europe will not return to the previous level On the global oil market, BP predicts not so much "the end of the era of growth in oil demand," as TASS put it, but "a drop in oil demand in the next 30 years." The scale and speed of this decline will largely depend on the pace of energy efficiency improvements in road transport and its electrification, in other words, on the transition to electric vehicles. In all three scenarios, oil use in the transport sector will peak in mid-2020. However, the states of the planet are to play a key role in the fate of oil. The more they stimulate the reduction of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, the faster the value of this energy carrier will fall. BP, which is increasingly transforming from an oil company into an energy firm with a focus on renewable energy, believes that global oil demand could fall by 10%, 55% and even 80% over the next three decades. The two scenarios assume that demand will never return to the level reached in 2019 after the COVID-19 pandemic. If we talk only about the European Union, then all three scenarios are based on the fact that the peak of oil consumption in the EU has already passed. It should be borne in mind that, for example, in Germany about a quarter of crude oil imports are provided by the Russian state-owned company Rosneft, which also owns stakes in three large oil refineries in Germany. Export of Russian coal to Europe: no future BP experts have no doubt that coal has no future in the European energy sector, especially since more and more countries are setting a specific end date for its use. According to two scenarios, the share of the corner in electricity generation in the EU will be 0% in 2050, one scenario assumes 5%. But until this year, about half of Russian coal exports went to the European direction, and in ports in the Baltic and near Murmansk, capacities for its shipment were expanded. At the same time, BP predicts the growing role of environmentally friendly hydrogen in the global and European energy sector. In three decades, the European Union will occupy the third place among the largest global consumers of H2 after China and the United States, the EU's share in global demand may reach 9-16%, according to Energy Outlook 2020. Germany is now accelerating the development of the hydrogen economy, and a number of German experts believe that Russia could become an important supplier of hydrogen to the Federal Republic of Germany and the EU as a whole, which would allow the Russian Federation to at least partially offset the losses from the reduction in oil and coal exports. Liquefied Natural Gas: Best Prospects in Asia Of all the fossil fuels, natural gas has the best chances in the global market, according to BP's long-term forecast. In one scenario, which does not imply the forced decarbonization of the world energy, global gas demand will grow by about a third compared to the level of 2018, in the other it will remain at this level, in the third, based on the most drastic reduction in CO2 emissions, it will decrease by about a third. True, demand will increasingly use liquefied natural gas (LNG), and its consumption will grow mainly in Asia, where it will be replaced by coal, BP analysts say. From this we can conclude that in the Russian fuel and energy complex, under any scenario, the best export prospects in the medium term are the LNG producers - Novatek and Gazprom, as well as Rosneft. Gazprom's pipeline deliveries to the European Union are still quite stable, but apparently nothing more. If anything, the European gas market and its largest supplier, Russia, have received surprisingly little attention in Energy Outlook 2020.