While China’s slowdown has long been touted as the contributor to the deterioration of mining stocks over the past couple of years, deeper analysis of what the Asian giant’s energy use will actually look like going forward is starting to cause tremors in the oil and gas world, including the LNG market.

The IEA announced on Friday that it forecast global oil demand growth of 1.2 million barrels per day for next year, as early indicators for the current quarter showed growth easing to 1.3MMbpd from a year earlier, from a peak of 2.2MMbpd last quarter.

China is, however, still leading the resulting annual growth of 1.8MMbpd for 2015, along with the US, India and – somewhat surprisingly – Europe, which makes sense given it was revealed last week that Australia was positioning itself to supply LNG to Europe.

Deloitte’s US oil and gas leader and vice-chairman John England said China itself, despite the stock market jitters over the summer, remained a huge source of global demand and China’s move to allow two children per family, rather than one, promised to double the numbers of drivers.

“US demand is responding to lower oil prices in the usual let’s-go-buy-a-new-car, or better yet, a-massive-SUV kind of way,” England said. “As auto sales go up, expect to see increased US demand.

“More broadly, Asian demand, beyond just China is showing strong growth.”

As has been broadly reported, total US production has finally started to decline and England believes that trend will continue next year.

Another good sign is that billions of dollars of investments have been deferred due to the low price environment, which translates to millions of barrels that will not be produced in the years to come.

“This sets the stage for a price rally,” England said.

The production decline offers hope to the industry because natural reservoir production decline, which has historically been 4-5% globally, means that even without demand growth, the oil and gas industry must produce another 4 million barrels per day every year just to keep up with current demand.

This naturally puts upward pressure on pricing.

“More than anything else in business, I believe in the power of free markets,” England said.

“Just as I believe the high prices of natural gas were a critical impetus for the development of the shale gas revolution, I believe today’s low crude prices are forcing an equally powerful innovation in the way oil is being developed and produced.

“Price forces innovation and I believe we are still in the early stages of what can be achieved in terms of reducing unit costs of oil production and ultimately increasing unit margin and achieving higher return on capital employed.

“The endgame is an oil and gas industry that will be stronger, leaner, and built to last.”

OPEC still roaring

While OPEC’s recent non-decision to act on lifting its production ceiling – which it regularly breaks anyway – to help lift oil prices was widely interpreted as a sign of its growing impotence, the IEA said that its slightly higher crude output still accounted for the lion’s share of the 50,000bpd increase in global oil supply last month.

The IEA reported that non-OPEC supply held at 58.5MMbpd in November, while annual growth slowed to below 300,000bpd from 2.2MMbpd at the start of this year.

“OPEC crude output edged up to 31.73MMbpd as record production from Iraq and higher supply from Kuwait offset losses from African members,” the IEA said in its Oil Market Report for December.

The OMR’s “call on OPEC crude and stock change” for 2016 was unchanged from the November issue at 31.3MMbpd – a substantial rise of 1.6MMbpd on this year.

The IEA also noted that OECD commercial stocks drew down for the first time in seven months in October to stand at 2971MMbbl at the end of the month.

“Global inventories are set to keep building at least until late 2016, but at a much slower pace than observed this year,” the IEA said.

“New and spare storage capacity should be able to accommodate the projected extra 300MMbbl of stocks.”

Yet more LNG fronts

Then there is Europe. Fairfax reported last week that Australian Finance Minister Mathias Cormann was leading the push to expand Australia’s mostly one-sided relationship with Germany in high-level talks.

While conceding there would be “geographical challenges” like getting the gas there, Cormann said some “creative thinking” could commercially work around them.

Germany, such as other European countries, is focused on reducing its energy reliance on Russia, which itself is faltering amid low oil prices.

Fraunhofer Society head of energy systems and markets Niklaus Hartmann said Australia was competing with Canada, the Middle East and Qatar as energy sources for Germany.

The society has $3 billion a year in research funds.

German industry officials will visit Australia early next year to initiate discussions with its domestic LNG sector about the logistics of shipping LNG to Europe.

Energy News also reported last week that the Australian High Commissioner to Pakistan Margaret Adamson offered Pakistan, which is in the midst of an energy crisis, the opportunity to buy Australian LNG.