Despite the economic downturn and the recession in most of the OECD countries, Dr. Gil Feiler, CEO of Info Prod Research forecasts that global demand for oil would pick up again after the summer of 2009. According to Feiler, the demand for petroleum would rise to 90 million barrels per day at that time.

Meanwhile, world economic slowdown is shrinking both global oil consumption and prices. In the USA, even when crude oil stocks fell 3.1 million barrels last week and OPEC cartel decided to cut production by 2.2 million barrels a day, prices went down.

Feiler expects that further global plunging demand for oil to reach 84 million barrels per day by mid 2009. He noticed that 2008 registered the first oil demand decline after more than 2.5 decades.
USA, the world\'s biggest oil market, is leading the downturn in oil consumption, while Japan,  the second-largest economy in the world, registered sizeable decline of around 11.4 per cent to 4.3 million barrels per day. The same applies for the economies of Canada, Mexico, France, Italy, Spain and the UK. The Chinese market, according to the CEO of Info Prod, is going to register milder downturn in consumption. In 200,8 the country is going to increase its consumption by a mere 1 percent to around eight million barrels per day compared to a growth rate of 15 percent in both 2006 and 2007.
However, Feiler projects a change during Q3 of 2009. According to him, there will be a price hike of at least 50 per cent per year following that quarter.