“Higher oil demand is expected in the 3rd and 4th Quarters”, HE Dr Mohammed Bin Saleh Al-Sada, Qatar’s Minister of Energy and Industry and current OPEC President said, expressing positive sentiments in a brief released from OPEC.

Global consumption of petroleum and other liquid fuels is estimated to have grown by 1.4 million b/d in 2015. EIA expects global consumption of petroleum and other liquid fuels to increase by 1.4 million b/d in 2016 and by 1.5 million b/d in 2017, mostly driven by growth in countries outside of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Non-OECD consumption growth was an estimated 1.0 million b/d in 2015, and it is expected to be 1.3 million b/d in 2016 and 1.5 million b/d in 2017.

BP’s energy outlook this year foresees a compound annual growth rate of gas demand at 1.8% until 2035. In the OECD, this growth results from the coal-to-gas transition in power generation. The US major ExxonMobil supports this view, forecasting gas will account for 30% of the power sector and will equal coal by 2040.

Supply and demand for oil are coming back into balance, and the response of shale producers to rising prices will help determine how high crude can go, Christof Ruehl, the global head of research at Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, said Wednesday in an interview in Dubai. Ruehl’s view that the re-balancing will take until at least the middle of 2017 contrasts with the more optimistic outlook of some industry leaders and analysts who foresee demand nearing supply by the end of this year.

“Now is our chance, and we have a window of three or four years to act,” before the balance of supply and demand might change, said Ken Koyama, a managing director and senior economist at Japan’s Institute of Energy Economics, which advises the Japanese government on energy policy.

Crude oil prices rallied to a 2016 high above $51/bbl in June, stoked by continuing outages in Nigeria and Canada as well as a steady decline in US oil production. May marked the third straight month of average price rises in Brent and WTI futures.

Iran is regaining market share at a faster pace than analysts had projected since sanctions were lifted in January, helped by securing more tankers through a temporary shipping insurance fix.

OPEC predicted that the global oil market will be more balanced in the second half of this year as demand rises and rival supplies falter, echoing views expressed by ministers at the group’s meeting this month.

Goldman Sachs said the market had ended almost two years of oversupply and flipped to a deficit.

China’s falling oil output and sliding U.S. production may help rebalance a market struggling to recover from the worst price crash in a generation