While oil producers and consumers made news recently at talks in Saudi Arabia by seeking assurances from each other about supply and demand outlooks down the road, one consuming country’s decidedly different route to the future has received scant notice.

Sweden announced plans last month for an ambitious detour on the global path toward increased hydrocarbon consumption: No More Oil.

Prime Minister Goran Persson announced he would head a commission aimed at phasing out completely the country’s dependency on oil by 2020. In 2004, Sweden, which is heavily dependent on nuclear power for its electricity, cut its oil use by 3.9%, to 319,000 barrels per day, while global oil demand rose by 3.1%, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

Its consumption - about as much as Hong Kong or the United Arab Emirates - amounts to just 0.4% of global demand. Alone, that’s hardly enough to give Saudi Arabia Oil Minister Ali Naimi shivers, or to make his call for a ‘’road map'’ for future oil demand more genuine. The world’s oil consumers can’t make intelligent predictions on far-out oil demand without a clear signal from the world’s biggest oil producer and exporter of what crude oil price they will defend in the future.

Naimi should know full well that you just can’t get a free map at a gasoline filling station anymore.

Sweden’s anti-oil stance comes as the government is fully buying into the idea that ‘’climate change is the greatest and most important environmental challenge of our time.'’ That thinking is far from taking a firm hold anywhere else, particularly in the U.S., where government forecasts call for gasoline demand to rise by 17% by 2012. Sweden’s initiative may take hold domestically thanks to national culture and dedication - think of the dramatic growth of IKEA into the world’s largest home furnishings store, covering the globe will all those assemble-yourself cabinets with drawers to hold all those small black wrenches.
But Sweden’s government isn’t fooled by the considerable hurdles.
‘’The real challenge will be to substitute gasoline and diesel oil in the transport sector,'’ said Persson. After that, it seems, the plan would proceed smoothly.

Sweden’s ambitious notion may face a political detour, though. Persson, seeking re-election next September, reportedly may face a no-confidence vote for failing to mobilize a rapid response to the last year’s Asian tsunami, which claimed the lives of more than 520 Swedes.