Press Quotes

16 February 2010, The Wall Street Journal
Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about last December's United Nations Copenhagen summit, Fatih Birol, the IEA Chief Economist said: “Unfortunately, the wind is not necessarily blowing in the right direction”. He added that “the pledges made so far mean 550 parts per million and result in a three-degree increase in temperature. That's much higher than many countries would like to see”.

04 February 2010, Business Week
Speaking at the Troika Dialogue in Moscow, Fatih Birol, the IEA Chief Economist said: “I don’t have very good news for Russia. The supply glut will stay until 2015 and may reach as much as 200 billion cubic meters by that year”. Gazprom, is “moderately optimistic” on the outlook for European gas demand as it expects its share of the European gas market to reach 32 percent by 2020 as the Russian gas-export monopoly rejects concerns over a looming supply glut.

28 January 2010, Reuters
Fatih Birol, IEA Chief Economist said: “When we look at the OECD countries -- the U.S., Europe and Japan -- I think the level of demand that we have seen in 2006 and 2007, we will never see again". Interviewed by Reuters from the sidelines of the Davos conference of business leaders, he added: “If there is a transformation in the transport sector, it may also slow down the growth substantially. Advanced-car technologies are very strong pushed in many countries”.

28 January 2010, AP Featured News
Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, predicted that the world will see a gas glut in the next four to five years, which he said would have huge implications for gas exporters such as Gazprom.

26 January 2010, The New York Times
“There still is no clear signal for the energy sector after Copenhagen, and that means that the existing uncertainty in energy sector investments continues, particularly in the developing world,” said Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency and a Davos 2010 Annual Meeting participant. While maintaining confidence that carbon regulations would spread globally over the long term, Birol warned: “Investors still have the incentives to build the kind of conventional coal-fired plants that lock in significant amount of carbon emissions for many years to come.”

19 January 2010, Business Week
The inability of government leaders to agree on stricter pollution controls at COP 15 Copenhagen meeting is showing up in commodity markets, where it’s getting cheaper to emit greenhouse gasses. “There is no binding agreement,” said Fatih Birol, IEA chief economist “There is no legal restriction. The global emission trajectory will be more or less in line with an increase of the global temperature of around 3 degrees.”

17 January 2010, Trading Markets
Fatih Birol, the IEA Chief Economist, presented the main findings of the World Energy Outlook 2009 in Riyadh last week. The International Energy Forum Secretariat (IEFS) Secretary General Noe van Hulst, the host of the day, rightly commented in his introductory remarks, "When Fatih speaks, the entire world listens." And so it was.

17 January 2010, Dawn.com
Fatih Birol, the IEA Chief Economist, presenting the WEO 2009 at the IEF Secretariat in Riyadh, said that the world is approaching an era of gas glut and by 2015 there would be an excess capacity of about 200 bcm. Birol underlined also that the issue of energy poverty is still haunting the mankind. 1.5 billion People, all over the world, still lack access to electricity, pointing to growing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

11 January 2010, The Wall Street Journal
If the public has to choose between creating jobs and spending billions to scrub invisible heat-trapping gases from the sky, jobs will win. That's why the campaign to combat climate change is morphing, at least politically, into an economic-development drive with an environmental twist. Fatih Birol, the IEA’s Chief Economist, commenting Copenhagen promises of the major countries, said: “There's still a major gap between the current pledges and the desired outcome”.

06 January 2010, Industrial Fuels and Power
Interview with Fatih Birol, IEA Chief Economist, on WEO 2009 findings and what the future might hold for the global power sector.