I have said many, many times that if I had only one metric with which to gauge the well-being of the American economy it would be "gasoline demand." Period. Dot. (Just as many folks suggest the best way to gauge inflation is to track the price of a McDonald's Big Mac.)
It is now clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the economics is settled, that the fuel of the future is natural gas (except for India and China, where coal will still be incredibly important for the former, and nuclear energy important for the latter).
I think that outside of China and India, one will be able to gauge the economic well-being of a region or continent or political bloc by following the growth in natural gas demand for that entity.
There are qualifiers and outliers.
For example, the Mideast growth in natural gas will be mostly due to Saudi Arabia's strategic goal to move from crude oil to natural gas to generate electricity for domestic consumption. I'm not sure I would equate growth in natural gas demand in the Mideast to economic well-being.
Europe, of course, is another outlier, but for different reasons. Europe wants to move from fossil fuel to unreliable energy (wind and solar). The tea leaves suggest that unreliable energy is nearing its "top" in the EU (for many reasons). Europe is also moving away from nuclear. One can argue that the fact there is absolutely "zero" natural gas growth in the out years for Europe has nothing do with economic growth. But something tells me that would be an inaccurate interpretation of the graphic. To me, it is absolutely glaring: when the rest of the world shows not only growth in natural gas demand, but significant growth in natural gas demand, and Europe bucks the trend ... not only does Europe not show significant growth in natural gas demand, it shows zero growth. Nada. Zilch. Null. None. That's fifteen years of no growth in natural gas, from 2020 to 2035.
Europe is truly an outlier.
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