Shell Australia Chairman: Rapid Energy Demand Growth To Resume

Shell Australia Chairman Russell Caplan said Monday rapid growth in energy demand will resume as economic conditions improve and that supply will struggle to keep pace.

“In the future, energy demand will resume a rapid pace of growth,” he said in the notes of a speech to be delivered to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia in Perth.
“Deep trends underpin this and they will reassert themselves as we emerge from the current global economic downturn.”

The global population will rise to nine billion people by the middle of this century and increasing prosperity will see people increasing their energy use, he said.

Caplan said massive investment would be required to deliver the energy needed without damaging the environment, and that to invest on this scale companies need both access to capital and sufficiently stable market conditions to allow reasonable assumptions about long term returns.

“Recently the global crisis has disrupted both,” he said.”

“And there’s a danger that if we don’t make enough large investments soon, the world will face an energy supply crunch around the middle of the next decade.”

Wall Street Journal, through Google News.