The medium-term oil demand outlook for the period 2016–2022 shows an increase of 6.9 mb/d, rising from 95.4 mb/d to 102.3 mb/d. This corresponds to a healthy average annual increase of almost 1.2 mb/d. Demand in developing countries is expected to be strong, increasing from 43.2 mb/d in 2016 to 49.6 mb/d in 2022. Globally, oil demand has been revised upwards by 2.24 mb/d in 2022 compared to the WOO 2016. This revision includes the upward shift to the baseline (+1.2 mb/d) in 2016. In addition, in this year's WOO, OECD regional oil demand is expected to grow until 2019, before the trend reverses. In last year's publication, OECD demand grew only until 2017. Long term global oil demand growth is forecast to decelerate steadily, from an annual average of around 1.3 mb/d during the period 2016–2020 to only 0.3 mb/d every year between 2035 and 2040. This deceleration is a result of slowing GDP growth, assumed oil price increases, a structural shift of economies towards a more service-oriented structure, efficiency improvements as a result of tightening energy efficiency policies and/or technological improvements, and oil facing strong competition from other energy sources.
Through the use of smart contracts, we can now replace paper and complex legal agreements that are cumbersome, difficult to transfer and can be hard to track for the average person and even for sophisticated investors. Our solution for commodity investing (mainly in oil) would be to switch to a digital system along the lines of Bitcoin but linked to an asset. This solution is the PERMIAN Token (XPR). Imagine a vault of oil barrels. The oil barrels are owned by ""Oil-owner Inc."" and the vault is owned by ""Vault Inc."" Vault Inc. has a spectacular reputation and third-party auditors who verify the amount of oil barrels in its vault. Oil-owner Inc. could offer a digital token to the public that represents ownership of the oil barrels and through a smart contract with Vault Inc. maintain a public off-chain registry that relates fractional interest in the gold with the tokens. For every token sold, Oil-owner Inc. transfers ownership to Vault Inc., who holds it on behalf of the token owner. Vault Inc. guarantees redemption of the value price of oil barrels by anyone who can prove ownership through a digital signature. Oil-owner Inc. can take advantage of the fact that Vault Inc. is trusted (and audited). Owners of the tokens rely on Vault Inc.'s representations and not on Oil-owner Inc. (even though Oil-owner Inc. is the token issuer). One of the main advantages would be that buyers of the tokens could know that they are the only person who has received the token, whereas a buyer of a paper certificate has no way of knowing that the same certificate hasn't been sold to multiple people.