Key Features of the World Energy Demand Forecast Portal

The Portal is a first-of-its-kind, unrivaled resource that features:

• Coverage of individual fuels, annually to 2030:
  • Crude & 18 oil products
  • Coal (three types)
  • Combustibles
  • Electricity
  • Natural gas
  • Hydro
  • Nuclear
  • Renewables
  • Plus, CO2 emissions
• Data for 143 countries
• By-sector coverage:
  • Transportation:
    • Cars
    • Bunkers
    • Other
  • Industrial:
    • Industrial
    • Non-Energy
    • Own use
    • Distribution
  • Residential/Comm./Public
  • Power Generation
• Economic growth and population projections
• Forecasts updated monthly

Different subscription levels

• Liquids-only or all fuels
• Option to add the Scenario Manager to create user-defined demand scenarios
• Option for ongoing support by PIRA analysts to assist in demand scenarios

The Benefits of the World Energy Demand Forecast Portal

The portal is a first-of-its-kind, unrivaled resource:

• It builds on PIRA’s 35+ years of experience doing long-term global energy demand forecasting.
• It provides access to the details of PIRA’s latest Reference Case energy demand forecast, by country, sector, fuel and product.
• It takes into account trends in economic growth, fuel efficiency, fuel substitution, and government policies in developing the projections.
• The data are derived from the in-house model that PIRA uses to produce our forecasts, which means that users immediately see the benefit of any future improvements we make to our data-gathering, assumptions and methodology.
• It incorporates the energy outlooks of all the key PIRA services: Global Oil, North American and European Natural Gas, North American and European Electric Power, International Coal, etc. — a complete global energy balance.

The World Energy Demand Forecast Portal saves you time and money — and can make you money:

• Gathering and inputting the source data, and maintaining such a robust database, would probably be more than a full-time job for a company to do on its own. As such, analysts are freed up to spend more time doing better analysis and forecasting, as they won’t be bogged down in data collection, model building and model maintenance.
• For those companies that choose the Premium version, they can go beyond the Portal’s latest reference case to perform their own impact analyses across many variables: prices, GDP and population growth, supply trends or shocks, government policies. These exercises, which would normally require a team of people many hours, can now be done by one person in minutes (usually with the assistance of a PIRA analyst).
• Deeper understanding of the outlook should lead to better decisions — and better profits.

What Do World Energy Demand Forecast Portal Clients Receive

Fast Access to PIRA's Latest Reference Case Demand Forecasts

The World Energy Demand Forecast Portal is the most efficient way to access and analyze PIRA’s latest Reference Case demand forecast: Just create your query and in seconds your data table appears, ready for you to download to your desktop.

Subscription Levels

Basic Service — Two Data Set Options

Users to the World Energy Demand Forecast Portal can choose from one of two different data packages. They are:

 1.  Liquids only, which includes the following:

2.  All fuels, which includes the above categories plus:

Premium Service: Upgrade Your Portal Access to Run Demand Scenarios

The World Energy Demand Forecast Portal is the most efficient way to access and analyze PIRA’s latest Reference Case forecast: Just create your specific query and in seconds your demand data table appears, ready for you to analyze or download to your desktop. But what if you want to test an alternative outlook or simply don’t want to rely on all of PIRA’s input assumptions? By upgrading to the Premium version of the World Energy Demand Forecast Portal, you can opt to add the Scenario Manager to your Portal access, which will allow you to develop (and store) your own custom demand forecasts.

The Scenario Manager allows you to change inputs and assumptions that reflect your own knowledge and hypotheses — efficiency improvements, elasticities, GDP, fuel mix, sensitivities, exogenous factors, and so on. Any of these — or any combination of these (within reason) — can be altered and tested. After your custom scenario is computed, you can compare the energy demands and emissions in your case with those in PIRA’s Reference Case, at any level of geographic or sectoral detail. All told, this simulation can be performed in 5 minutes with the Portal’s Scenario Manager. Without such a tool, the simulation would require a team of analysts many days to produce an internally consistent energy demand simulation with only a minor level of geographic detail.

If you would like to learn about the Scenario Manager and World Energy Demand Forecast Portal - Premium version, please contact PIRA for a demonstration and a custom quote. 

Running Your Own Demand Scenario Forecast

The real strength of the Portal's Premium version is how it puts control into the users hands, allowing them to test an alternative outlook or to rely on their own input assumptions. Here’s how you can use it to create your own custom demand forecast:

As an example, let’s investigate the impact of an oil price spike in 2015:

1. Launch the Scenario Manager module.
2. Copy the latest “PIRA Reference Case” and enter a new scenario name; e.g. “Price Spike” and click “Create.”
3. Your new scenario now has all of the Reference Case parameters. So, now you’ll edit the parameters, specifically one of the “Long-Term Indicators.”
4. In the Parameters box (on left, above), after selecting Commodity Price > Brent and year range 2013 to 2030, you will change the price for the year you want. In this example, you will create the “spike” by changing the 2015 Brent price to $200 (as shown in the graphic below). After entering 200, click “Update.” (Of course, you can change any number of prices/years — or other parameters, within reason — or do such in a new custom scenario.)
5. Click on the “Enable Model Sensitivity” button if you would like to let the model incorporate the impact the oil price spike would have on GDP growth. Then click the “Compute” button.
6. After the model has finished computing, go to the Reporting Engine page to compare the “Price Spike” scenario with the Reference Case scenario. In the Reporting Engine you can compare the energy demands and emissions in the Price Spike case with those in PIRA’s Reference Case, at any level of geographic or sectoral detail you are interested in. You can also compare the GDP growth for any country or region in the Price Spike case with PIRA’s Reference Case. All told, this simulation can be performed by one analyst in about 5 minutes with the World Energy Demand Forecast Portal. Without such a tool, the simulation could easily require a team of analysts many days to produce an internally consistent energy demand simulation, which might well lack the geographic and sectoral detail the Portal provides.

More About the World Energy Demand Forecast Portal

Overview of Methodology and User Customization

At the core of PIRA’s consultation is a bottom-up, exhaustive examination of the fundamentals and energy balances that drive market trends, both near and long term. A critical input, therefore, is a forecast of demand. PIRA’s modeling approach is to forecast energy demand for an individual country at a sectoral level. For an individual country and sector, energy demand is determined by a combination of external demand drivers (including GDP and population growth, and energy prices) and model parameters (including price, income and population elasticities, and rates of efficiency improvement). Once a sector’s total energy demand is determined, that sector’s demand for individual fuels is determined by a set of parameters, including trends in available supply and fuel mix. PIRA’s short-term oil demand forecast is updated once a month, and it is incorporated in an updated PIRA Reference Case on a monthly basis. The outlook for all fuels is updated at least twice a year.

With this rich set of external assumptions and model parameters driving the detailed demand forecast by country, sector and fuel, the Portal provides a unique tool to create an extremely rich and detailed energy demand forecast. Users can not only create their own reference case, reflecting their own assumptions about external demand drivers and characteristics of energy demand behavior, but they can also perform sophisticated sensitivity analysis, examining the impact of such things as external events, government policies, or technology changes on energy demand. In both modes, the Portal allows users to examine the results at an extremely granular level (by fuel, by sector, by country) or to roll up the bottom-up details to larger aggregates to assess overall market impacts.

Note: As with any model, it is possible to make changes to the initial assumptions that produce inconsistent or questionable results. In most cases, inconsistent results highlight a combination of assumptions that may not be internally consistent. For example, if the exogenous growth rate for nuclear power is pushed so high that more electricity is generated than there is demand, the “swing” fuel action of the model will push the demand for one or more fossil fuels in power generation negative. The appearance of negative energy demands (in any sector) generally signals that there is some inconsistency in the model user’s assumptions, which should be modified in some way before finishing the forecast.

"Swing Fuels"

The World Energy Demand Forecast Portal incorporates the concept of “swing” fuels. This reflects the fact that some fuel supply may be relatively fixed (e.g. nuclear power) and that any variations in a sector’s energy demand in an individual country will likely be met by a small subset of fuels (typically fossil fuels), where fuel supply is available in variable quantities and there is sufficient energy using capital stock available. For example, while 20% of China’s electricity generation might come from nuclear and hydro, in any given year any additional electricity demand will likely be met by fossil fuels, since available nuclear and hydro capacity is fully utilized under almost any circumstance. In practice, the Portal assigns swing fuel shares to the key end-use sectors for each country. These shares must add up to 100%, but can allocate any proportion of the “swing” demand for energy to any individual fuel. For example, in China variations in demand for power generation are met 80% by coal, 10% by natural gas and 10% by oil.

Two Ways to Use the Portal's Premium Version

Conceptually there are two separate ways that the Premium version of the World Energy Demand Forecast Portal can be used to develop energy demand forecasts. In the first way, the user is developing a reference case forecast, where they have developed their own forecast for key model demand drivers and parameters, such as GDP and population growth, energy prices, exogenous energy supply trends, efficiency improvements, etc. Through the Portal's Scenario Manager, users can input these assumptions to the model and use the model to calculate the energy demands that will be driven by these external demand drivers and other assumptions. Note: the Portal always contains the latest PIRA Reference Case demand forecast as well as any user-saved cases. Users should label their reference case to make sure it is identifiable.

In the second way, the user can assess the impact of a change in assumptions on the energy demand outlook, performing a sensitivity analysis. Starting with a reference case (his own or PIRA’s), the user might want to change an assumption about energy prices, for example. The Scenario Manager has an option to enable a set of model sensitivities that change a number of key model assumptions in response to the changes to other model drivers. For example, with this sensitivity module enabled, oil prices significantly higher than the Reference Case will depress GDP growth in oil importing countries, cause light vehicle fleet miles per gallon to increase faster, and increase the penetration of non-oil-fueled vehicles, with all of these impacts being determined by a set of sensitivity parameters.

Sectors Covered

The energy demand sectors in the World Energy Demand Model are:

• Industrial
• Residential / Commercial / Public Administration
• Own Use
• Distribution
• Non-Energy
• Transportation:
  • Bunkers
  • Cars
  • Other
• Power Generation

At the end-use sector level, electricity demand is specifically displayed as a component of energy demand in the sector. The separate power generation sector displays both the primary energy consumed in electric generation and the electric power produced. When combining all sectors to a country or regional total, the electricity demand in end-use sectors is netted out against the electricity generated (plus net imports), displaying only the primary energy consumption of the country or region.

Countries/Regions Covered

• Africa
• Australia / New Zealand
• Canada
• China
• Eastern Europe
• The Former Soviet Union
• Japan
• Latin America
• The Middle East
• South Asia
• Southeast Asia
• The United States
• Western Europe

Most of these regions are self-explanatory, with the following PIRA conventions:

• Eastern Europe does NOT include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, or Turkey
• The former Soviet Union DOES include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania
• Latin America includes Mexico, the Caribbean, as well as Central and South America
• Southeast Asia includes North and South Korea and Mongolia
• Western Europe includes Turkey

Fuels*

• Coal
• Bituminous/Coke
• Lignite/Brown
• Sub-bituminous
• Combustibles (Traditional biomass)
• Hydro
• Natural Gas
• Nuclear
• Oil
• Aviation Gasoline
• Biodiesel
• Bitumen
• Crude Oil
• Ethane
• Ethanol
• Gasoil/Diesel
• Jet Fuel Kerosene
• LPG (excluding Ethane)
• Lubricants
• Motor Gasoline
• Naphtha
• Natural Gas Liquids
• Other Products
• Paraffin Waxes
• Petroleum Coke
• Refinery Gas (Still Gas)
• RFO: High Sulfur
• RFO: Low Sulfur
• Renewables
• Combustible Renewables and Waste
• Solar, Wind and Other

(*Not all users have access to all fuels. Portal options include packages for liquids only or all listed fuels.)

Fees

The World Energy Demand Forecast Portal is sold as an annual online subscription (inclusive of data updates and software enhancements). Companies have the option to choose either an oil-only data package or all fuels. Companies may also opt to have access to the Premium version of the Portal. Such access, since it depends on the client’s current retainer package and the amount of consultation desired, must be custom quoted.

Please contact your PIRA account representative, or sales@pira.com, for more information on the World Energy Demand Forecast Portal (including arranging an online demonstration) and to receive a fee quote.