World's Energy Consumption

The graph of the world’s total primary energy supply represents the su of production and imports, subtracting exports and storage changes. This figure ignores conversion efficiency, thus the forms of energy with poor conversion efficiency such as coal and gas are overstated unlike efficiently converted sources such as hydroelectricity. 

Based on the graph of the World’ total primary energy supply from 1971 to 2013, there has been an increase in the energy supply of all of the different supplies represented by the graph, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, biofuels, and waste. However, there has been a far greater increase in the supplies of biofuels and waste, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro energy supply. This means that the world is focusing in on moving towards these sources of energy as our main supplies. In the past, oil has been the largest energy supply for the world because the amount of energy supplied of each type of fuel is based on the difference between its highest and lowest values on the y-axis of the graph for that given year. Thus oil had approximately a 2,100 Mtoes which is 2,100*10^6 million tons of oil equivalent. One mtoe is the amount of energy released in burning 1 ton of crude oil. Meanwhile sources such as natural gas had a supply of approximately 500 Mtoes in 1971. In 2013, the supplies of oil and natural gas were at 4,000 Mtoes and 3,000 Mtoes respectively. Thus there was a 1,900 Mtoe increase in oil 2,500 Mtoe increase in natural gas supplies. This verifies the projections that our future energy usage will follow in the same direction as our energy supplies, away from the use of inefficient fuels such as oil and coal and towards the use of natural gas and nuclear energy.

Advanced economies such as the USA and Japan have a large percentage of the world GDP while developing economies such as China and India have very low percentages of the world’s GDP, even though they have larger percentages of the world’s population; 20% and 17% for China and India respectively, while the US and Japan have 4.6% and 2.0% of the world’s population respectively. However, it seems that according to the data in table 1.5, the world energy consumption for these countries is not based on the percent of world GDP that they hold, but rather on the percent of world population that they hold. China’s percent of world population is 20% and India’s was at 17% in 2001 while the rest of the countries listed in the table including the United States and Japan had less than 5% of the world’s population.

The final figure that we are given, figure 1.7, allows us to note that the linear trend line between the energy consumption per capita is directly proportional to the GNP per capita. Although it seems that the USA and Japan are almost outliers in this figure for they have the greatest deviation from the trend line of the figure.

With the trend of a directly proportional world energy consumption and world population, it can be projected that the world energy consumption of China and India will increase exponentially as their percent of the world GDP increases over time.

According to the quiz taken online, my total gas emissions currently are at the following levels: 25 tons of CO2 eq per year while the average per person in the US is 27 tons of eq/ year and the world average is 5.5 tons of CO2 eq/year. According to the quiz taken online, my total projected gas emissions 20 years into the future are at the 21 tons of CO2 eq per year. Although my personal gas emissions are projected to decrease only by a little bit over the next 20 years, it is still over 19.5 and 15.5 tons more than the world average which is rather high in my opinion. It’s still lower than the US average so I believe the fact that my high values are due to the lifestyle that living in the United States entails. I believe that no matter where I live in the united states, my values will be far closer to the US average than the world average.