Global Oil Market Forecasts

How to read the gap between these forecasts

The charts above are most useful when you read the disagreement, not just the lines. The values in the PetroEyes forecast file were compiled on 2026-02-14, and the file's own numbers make three points that hold whenever you compare agency outlooks.

First, in this set the demand gap is much wider than the supply gap. For 2026, consumption is forecast at 105.8 mb/d by the IEA, 106.2 by the EIA, and 108.1 by OPEC: a spread of 2.3 mb/d, roughly the daily consumption of a large economy, between the lowest and highest reading of the same year. Production forecasts for 2026 sit in a far narrower band, 106.7 (IEA), 106.8 (EIA), and 107.4 (OPEC), a spread of 0.7 mb/d. Supply is built from fields, projects, and quotas that can be counted in advance. Demand depends on economic growth, vehicle efficiency, and fuel switching, which is where the agencies' assumptions pull apart.

Second, the agencies do not even agree on the past. The same file lists 2025 consumption, a year already complete when it was compiled, as 104.3 mb/d (IEA), 104.5 (EIA), and 106.3 (OPEC). Definitions and coverage differ: what counts as oil demand, which countries are estimated rather than surveyed, and how biofuels and other liquids are treated. So a forecast gap is not three readings of one agreed history with different futures attached. It is three different histories, extended forward.

Third, a forecast is a dated statement, not a standing fact. This file was compiled before the 2026 Strait of Hormuz disruption noted in the introduction above, so the agencies' current editions differ from the lines drawn here, and the honest use of this page is as a record of what the three outlooks said at one point in the cycle and how far apart they were. When you read a newer edition, compare each agency with its own previous edition first: the direction and size of a revision usually say more than the level, because a revision means new data changed that agency's mind. Then compare across agencies for the same target year, and treat any demand gap above about 1 mb/d as a sign that the market balance for that year is genuinely unsettled, not that one agency must be wrong.

A short reading protocol follows from those three points. Note the compile or publication date before the numbers. Compare revisions within one agency before comparing levels across agencies. Read the demand and supply gaps separately, because they have different causes. And check the forecast against the weekly physical data as it arrives: the EIA inventory analysis and the global oil map show what production, consumption, and stocks actually did, which is the ground any forecast has to meet.

Reading the monthly outlooks yourself

The charts above compress three monthly publications into a few lines. Each report has its own conventions, and the headline number only makes sense once you know what it measures. Two guides on this site walk through them table by table: how to read the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook covers the release calendar, the data tables, and how to compare one month's forecast with the last, and how to read OPEC's Monthly Oil Market Report explains secondary-source production figures and the demand for OPEC+ crude. For the weekly data that feeds the near-term forecasts, see the EIA weekly petroleum report guide and the oil price forecast hub.

Questions about agency forecasts