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¡¡PARIS, May 11 (Xinhuanet) -- The International Energy
Agency forecast on Wednesday the world oil demand this year will grow by
2.2 percent instead of the 2.1 percent in predicted last month.
"The oil market is still rebalancing from last year's demand surge," the IEA said in its monthly report.
It said that demand pressures in China and the United
States had continued to ease, and that it had revised downwards its estimate of
demand in Europe, but consumption in some other regions had risen.
Demand by countries in the Pacific, the rest of Asia,
the former Soviet Union and the Middle East had increased, said the report.
The rise in US stocks, coinciding with high prices,
was prompting the widest divergence in opinions about the established
relationships between stocks and prices, the IEA said.
"Some see the co-existence of high prices and high US
stocks asa speculative phenomenon, others as a harbinger of pending price
weakness. Others, including ourselves, see it as both a cyclical and a regional
issue," it said.
The agency raised the possibility of a rapid
tightening of the US crude market, "particularly if currently unfavorable price
differentials continue to hamper imports".
Overall, world demand for oil in the first quarter of
2005 seemed to have been slightly less strong than had been expected, rising by
1.83 million barrels per day or by 0.29 million barrels less than forecast.
The IEA also expected growth of demand to slow to 1.7
million barrels per day after an increase of 2.4 million barrels per day in the
fourth quarter of last year.
However, the IEA conditioned this by saying that
events depended on the severity of the weather and the strength of growthof the
US economy.
On the supply side, the IEA said that supplies had
risen by 0.435 million barrels per day in April from the March figure to
84.5million barrels per day.
Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries had increased their output by 480,000 barrels per day to 29.4 million
barrels. Enditem
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