Improvements in energy efficiency and wider deployment of low-carbon technologies could reduce global gas consumption by five per cent by 2015 and 17 per cent by 2030 compared to a business-as-usual scenario, according to new projections from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The Financial Times reported yesterday that a draft version of the IEA's World Energy Outlook, the flagship annual report due for release next week, shows that the planned rollout of renewable and nuclear energy programmes should begin to significantly eat into demand for natural gas within the next five years.

It predicted that even with the projected economic recovery, European demand for gas will not recover to 2008 levels of 542 billion cubic metres (bcm) until 2020 before then dropping back to 525bcm by 2030.

As a result, gas is likely to become oversupplied and prices are predicted to fall, reducing Europe's reliance on Russia as its major supplier.

In addition, the report said that in the US the identification of large reserves of gas trapped in shale rocks has opened up vast new areas of supply, eradicating the need for liquefied natural gas imports from abroad.

A supply crunch in gas has long been a concern of political leaders and is a major factor in Euro-Russian relations. The IEA estimates Russia holds a quarter of the world's gas reserves.

Some experts have feared that the carbon caps imposed through the EU's emissions trading scheme will lead to greater reliance on gas from 2020 onwards as energy generators switch from coal to gas as a less carbon-intensive alternative.

But the IEA report argues that environmental policies designed to limit carbon dioxide emissions, will only provide a short term boost for gas, predicting that gas demand will peak in the early 2020s as energy firms increasingly focus on renewables and nuclear.

In another section of the report released by the agency last month, the IEA said that economic crisis had deferred investment in polluting technologies and as a result CO2 emissions could fall in 2009 by as much as three per cent - steeper than at any time in the last 40 years.

The agency said that this recession-induced drop in emissions gave world leaders a unique opportunity to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy by cancelling postponed carbon-intensive projects and shifting the focus to low-carbon alternatives.