The world hasn’t seen peak oil demand yet, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) told Bloomberg News on Monday, expecting that sooner or later, oil consumption would return to the pre-crisis levels and rise above that. “In the absence of strong government policies, a sustained economic recovery and low oil prices are likely to take global oil demand back to where it was, and beyond,” Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the IEA, told Bloomberg. Birol’s assessment of oil demand trends for after the COVID-19 pandemic and recession could sound reassuring to major oil-producing nations that depend on oil revenues for their budgets, as well as to oil majors, some of which have expressed uncertainty whether oil demand will ever return to the 2019 levels. The pandemic adds not only a layer of uncertainty in the oil industry in the short term, but it also creates another challenge […]