India's Oil Demand Growth Could Disappoint Market Bulls

Yahoo

30-05-2025

India is overtaking China as the world's biggest oil demand growth driver in a momentous shift in the oil market where China dominated growth in the past two and a half decades.
While India's growth rate is ahead of China's, Indian volumes aren't anywhere near the Chinese boom in consumption that began in the early 2000s. And they never will be.
With the pace of Chinese growth decelerating and India's accelerating, market bulls are correct to expect that India will lead demand growth numbers. But they could be disappointed that Indian demand growth isn't soaring at a pace similar to China's. In the period 2000-2025, Chinese demand growth averaged 485,000 barrels a day (bpd), as pointed out by Bloomberg Opinion columnist Javier Blas.
India's total oil demand is about 6 million bpd at present, and it is growing at around 200,000 bpd every year. This is less than half of China's booming annual demand growth in the 2000s and 2010s.Since the COVID slump in demand everywhere, India's oil consumption growth has settled at about 150,000 bpd to 200,000 bpd each year. It's expected to continue at around these levels, forecasters say.
China, for its part, faces major structural shifts in its economy and transportation sector, with slower GDP growth, a weak property market, and booming electric vehicle sales and sales of trucks running on LNG that are displacing part of the gasoline and diesel consumption.
India surpassing China as the world's top driver of oil demand growth isn't surprising at all. The surprise, if any, came from the fact that this is happening a bit earlier than many forecasters had expected a year or two ago.But key to looking at this shift is to see that China's oil demand growth is slowing while India's isn't soaring. Indian demand is rising, but not anywhere close to the Chinese boom of the past two decades.
So, those who expect India to be the 'next China' could be in for a disappointment.Oil demand growth in China will be just 1.5% this year compared to 2024, according to OPEC's latest Monthly Oil Market Report. India's demand will grow by 3.4%-- so the growth in India is higher than in China. But China is expected to consume more than 16 million bpd of oil this year, compared to India's 6 million bpd.
In India, oil demand in March was slightly lower than in the same month last year, OPEC said in its report. Definitely not an estimate oil bulls, Saudi Aramco, or other oil companies wanted to hear.
Diesel and other transportation fuels will support India's oil product demand, which is expected to grow by 188,000 bpd this year from 2024 to average 5.7 million bpd, OPEC said in its report in May.
Next year, oil demand is projected to grow by 246,000 bpd year-over-year to average 6.0 million bpd, 'supported by robust economic growth amid healthy transportation and manufacturing activities,' the cartel noted.
This should be good news about Indian demand growth, considering the volatile U.S. trade and tariff policy, which could quickly dampen economic and market sentiment several times by the end of this year alone.
But 246,000-bpd annual growth in India next year would compare to China's nearly 500,000-bpd growth in each of the years 2000 through 2025, with the exception of a couple of crises with the global financial crisis and COVID.
Now China's consumption of transportation fuels has peaked, many forecasters and state giant China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) say.
Some of the weakness in Chinese oil demand growth has been attributed to China's weaker economic performance over the past year. But the shift toward EVs and LNG trucks is removing some road fuel demand permanently, analysts say.
India could see an acceleration of oil demand growth in the next decade as incomes rise and consumers spend more on consumer goods.
India will be the fastest-growing oil demand region among large economies, Nikhil Bhandari, Co-head of APAC Natural Resource & Clean Energy Research at Goldman Sachs, told CNBC earlier this week.
Income growth and rising manufacturing will result in India accounting for a third of global oil demand growth over the next decade, Bhandari said.
As a rule of thumb, at a certain level of income growth, there is acceleration of oil demand as consumers buy more consumer goods apart from staples, the expert noted.
And India is currently at an inflection point of income growth, which would accelerate oil demand growth over the next decade, according to Goldman Sachs's Bhandari.
Although India's growth in percentage terms exceeds China's growth pace, China still consumes significantly more oil—around triple the total amount India uses. And when the biggest oil importer in the world, China, begins to see slowing growth, India isn't able to offset the slowdown or replicate the boom in demand.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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