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Paris - Booming oil production in North America brought on by the shale energy revolution has created a global "supply shock" that is reshaping the industry, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday.
Presenting the agency's five-year outlook for the oil market, IEA executive director Maria van der Hoeven said: "North America has set off a supply shock that is sending ripples throughout the world".
The shale oil and gas boom has become the gold rush of the 21st century, with tens of billions of dollars in revenues and hundreds of thousands of new jobs in places as remote as North Dakota, in the Great Plains of the United States."A mature economy which about 150 years ago had been the cradle of the oil industry, but had since faced what seemed like an irreversible production decline, (has) all of a sudden found itself at the centre of a new oil boom," the IEA said.
The boom has created a brand new energy supply in a development that "will be as transformative to the market over the next five years as was the rise of Chinese demand over the last 15."
While Canada has long been a major energy exporter, the rise of shale-based hydrocarbons has meant a crucial change for the United States, which could move from the being the world's leading importer of oil to a net exporter within the next few years.
An IEA forecast in November had already made headlines in forecasting that the United States would become the world's biggest oil producer by 2017 thanks to shale energy.
But the process behind the boom has proved controversial, with environmentalists worried that the unconventional technology involved, known as fracking, poses a major threat to the environment and may trigger earthquakes.
Forecast
On the back of shale output, the IEA said it expected North American supply to grow by 3.9 million barrels per day (mbd) from 2012 to 2018, or nearly two-thirds of total forecast non-Opec supply growth of 6.0 mbd.
But North America was "just one part of the story" the IEA said, as production capacity in traditional Opec suppliers in the Middle East will continue to grow in the next five years, "though adversely affected by growing insecurity in North and Sub-Saharan Africa" in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings.
Opec capacity, which counts for 35% of today's global oil output, is expected to gain 1.75 mbd to 36.75 mbd in 2018, about 750 000 barrels per day less than under a 2012 forecast.
The IEA, an OECD offshoot that tracks the energy market for the world's industrialised nations, meanwhile raised marginally its earlier outlook for global oil demand growth in 2013 to 90.6 mbd.
The forecast for non-Opec supply in 2013 meanwhile was raised 50 000 to 54.5 mbd due to strong output in North America.
