In “Biofuels pose no threat to OPEC, says IEA,” the Financial Times (June 7, 2007) offers several sobering observations:

• “OPEC has nothing to fear. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, the contribution from biofuels would be very small,” Claude Mandil, head of the International Energy Agency, told the Financial Times
• Mr Mandil said that even in the worst case for Opec, in which consuming countries implemented policies to curb oil consumption, the IEA forecast that global oil demand in 2015 would rise by close to 10m barrels a day, to 94.8m b/d.
• The potential of the current generation of biofuels is severely constrained by the competition with the food industry for feed stocks such as corn and wheat.
• Even if there is a breakthrough to those “second-generation” biofuels, Wood Mackenzie, the consultancy, estimates they might displace only up to 4 per cent of world oil demand in the next decade.