ByIrina Slav– Jan 30, 2025, 1:18 AM CST
The International Energy Agency is producing potentially “dangerously wrong” reports due to its marked pro-transition bias, the former chief of the IEA’s oil industry and markets department.
Neil Atkinson, the former IEA executive, authored a report in partnership with Mark P. Mills, the head of the think tank the National Center for Energy Analytics, and presented it this week, calling on the IEA to focus on its original purpose, which was monitoring of oil market developments and industry outlook.
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Titled “Energy Delusions”, the report stated that “The IEA’s current preoccupation with promoting an energy transition has resulted in its signature annual report, the World Energy Outlook (WEO), offering policymakers a view of future possibilities that are, at best, distorted and, at worst, dangerously wrong.”
The authors also noted that the IEA’s reports and forecasts need to be realistic because “The IEA’s legacy reputation continues to influence not only trillions of dollars in investment decisions but also government policies with far-reaching geopolitical consequences.”
This reputation is now in danger because of the IEA’s own actions as it chooses to cheerlead the energy transition rather than stick to producing realistic forecasts for the future, instead generating “dangerously misleading outlooks.”
This is not the first outspoken criticism of the IEA. The agency last year angered OPEC by forecasting peak oil and gas demand in a few years, even as it forecasted growth in demand, The IEA attracted unflattering attention a few years ago when it published its Roadmap for Net Zero, in which the agency said no new exploration for oil and gas was needed after the end of 2021. Just months later, the IEA was calling on OPEC to ramp up exploration amid rising international oil prices.
In response to the “Energy Delusions” report, the IEA said that it was “full of rudimentary errors” and “fundamental misrepresentations about both energy systems in general and IEA modeling in particular”, per a Reuters report.
By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com
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