RISING US shale oil production will help meet most of the world's new oil demand in the next five years, even if the global economy picks up steam, leaving little room for OPEC to lift output without risking lower prices, the International Energy Agency said yesterday.

The IEA's outlook came in its closely watched semi-annual report, which analyses mid-term global oil supply and demand trends.

"North America has set off a supply shock that is sending ripples throughout the world," IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said.

"The good news is that this is helping to ease a market that was relatively tight for several years," she added. Oil yesterday traded near US$103 a barrel, well below its peak of US$147 in 2008.

The IEA said it expected global demand to rise 8 percent on aggregate between 2012 and 2018 to reach 96.7 million barrels per day based on a fairly optimistic assumption by the International Monetary Fund of 3-4.5 percent global economic growth a year during the period.

That incremental demand will be met mainly by non-OPEC production, which will rise by more than 10 percent between 2012 and 2018 to 59.31 million bpd, the IEA said, lifting its estimate of non-OPEC supply in 2017 by 1 million bpd versus its previous report in October.

The United States will overtake Russia as the world's largest non-OPEC producer as early as 2015, the IEA said.

That may leave OPEC, which had been long seen as the last resort for the world to meet rising demand, with output fluctuating around the current 30 million bpd for the next five years.

The IEA cut its estimate of the demand for OPEC crude in 2017 to 29.99 million bpd, down by 1.22 million bpd from its previous report six months ago.

It said OPEC's spare capacity will rise by more than a quarter to reach 6.4 million bpd, or 6.6 percent of global demand.