Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
This is a great time to talk about energy use worldwide. Not because it’s topical, or politically important, or anything like that. It’s a great time because the math is easier now than ever before, and easier than it ever will be again.
It’s similar to a time a few years ago when there were almost exactly 100 million households in the United States. It made a lot of calculations really easy to do. And this year, the United States Department of Energy calculates that the world used 500 quads of energy. Ah, the symmetry.
Even more conveniently, the United States and China will each use roughly 100 quads. Comparisons, contrasts–you don’t even need a calculator! A quad is a quadrillion British Thermal Units, and is roughly equivalent to the energy liberated from 36 million tons of coal. It’s a lot of energy, and 500 of those quads is really a mind stretcher. (For those of you who are counting, about 52 of those quads came from renewable energy. Of those 52 quads, about 50 came from hydroelectric power… urkk…)
In 2035, the DOE figures the world will consume about 683 quads, give or take. The UN, more ambitiously, thinks it’ll come in at about 703 quads. Either way, they anticipate a 40% growth in energy requirements. Is it okay if I say I think they’re both wrong?
Here’s why: The UN (and pretty much everybody else) believes that the world’s population will be at or around 8 billion in 2035. The UN (and pretty much everybody else) believes that world GDP will grow by about 3% per year between now and then–which is pretty much what it has been doing for quite a while. But most of that growth is projected to occur in the developing world. And most of that growth will be very energy intensive.
Here in the U.S., our energy consumption per person has been declining for a while, now. We’re down from 337 million btu’s per person to 323 mbtu’s per capita. But it’s going in the other direction in the developing world. They need the energy to actually, well, develop. And then they want the energy to enjoy the fruits of their development. Makes sense–that’s exactly what we did here.
Price Waterhouse Coopers has projected GDP growth to 2050 for major economies. For the U.S., they predict per capita growth in GDP from $40,339 in 2005 to $88,443 in 2050. Most of the very well developed countries show the same level of growth–a bit better than doubling.
The Department of Energy has energy use per person for many of the same countries. So let’s look at China. Before I start, remember that China has doubled its energy use since 2000. And they’re not done yet.
Their 2005 GDP per capita was $1,664 and their energy usage per capita was 58.8 mbtu’s. Their 2050 GDP per capita is projected to be $23,534, similar to Spain’s present GDP per person. Spain’s energy use is 164 mbtu’s. So who wants to predict China’s energy use per person in 2050? In 2035?
We’re always picking on China, and we don’t need to. The scary part is we can do the exact same thing for Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey and India. The developing world is developing. They are going to be energy-sucking monsters for the next 80 years–just like we were.
My calculations show that, if we succeed in persuading the developing world to use energy efficient technologies wherever possible, switching from coal to natural gas, adopting wind and solar, buying best of breed turbines, etc., the world’s energy consumption in 2035 will be about 1,100 quads. However, if they proceed as they are (mostly) doing now, throwing up dirty coal to avoid blackouts and brownouts, cobbling together solutions however they can, world energy use in 2035 might well approach 2,000 quads–or even surpass it.
Imagine a world of 8.1 billion people, 7 billion of whom are using energy at the same rate as we do here in America–323 million btu’s per head. (3.23 x 7, for Joe Romm). That’s over 2,100 quads. It is at this point that some ugly questions appear. If we burn coal to obtain this energy, that’s 2,100 x 36 million tons of coal. If we withhold energy from these people, we condemn them to lives of starvation and poverty. If we subsidize clean energy solutions for them, we are spending our hard earned tax money on the poorest of the poor, many of whom live in countries that are not friendly to us. Oh, wait… we’re already doing that, aren’t we?
I favor the third solution. Using your and my tax dollars to help the poor afford electricity that comes from natural gas, nuclear and other cleaner solutions, so they can afford to buy our video games and see our movies (and, well, pay for them…). I do not expect my idea of the best solution to be very popular. Not with climate alarmists, who already don’t like natural gas or nuclear, and want to limit energy consumption by everybody except for themselves. Probably not with many readers here, who have seen taxpayer money go up in smoke on so many poorly-designed projects. But I think it’s our duty to ourselves, as well as the poorest of the poor.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Yes, even easier when Saudi Arabia itself peaks…
Re: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/01/global-energy-use-in-the-21st-century/#comment-472145
SSN – sunspot number
CET – central England temperature
NAP – north Atlantic precursor
Smokey said
“Human ingenuity, guided by the free market [as one type of energy becomes too expensive, other types will replace it] will provide plenty of energy.”
Question for GM -when in the world’s history did this not happen?
Also GM how about cutting out the ad hom attacks. RC and JR etc welcomes it but not here.
As an alternative to sending our tax money to frequently-corrupt third world governments, the most productive — and cost-free — measure that could be taken would be to can the EU bureaucracy’s ban on importation of genetically-modified foodstuffs.
There are pest- and disease-resistant strains of grain and root vegetables that have been developed that would greatly increase yields, as well as enhanced varieties of rice that would relieve widespread dietary-deficiency diseases. But none of this is being planted in Africa due to fears that exports to Europe would be cut off.
If we can increase the prosperity of Africa, energy will take care of itself — as long as the sanctimonious greens can be kept at bay.
I am sorry to say but my alma matter has produced a good number of idiots over the years in addition to the really large number of really smart and educated people. Ironically, it also produced the original Limits to Growth study, but I don’t see you attaching its name to it, I wonder why.
[snip], anyone who claims that money and not energy is what matters, [snip]
kdk33 says:
September 1, 2010 at 5:02 am
“No. It is not he duty of American taxpayers to subsidize hostile, corrupt, disfunctional, despotic (the list goes on) thirld world governments.”
Actually, one theory is that violent overthrow (ie war) on despotic, corrupt, disfunctional, hostile governments, though bloody and costly pays off better for us and those being oppressed within those countries, with less long term violence, bloodshed and misery than does sending them money which is stolen by their rulers and used against us. But then, we seem to no longer have the stomach for such endeavors. Worked fine with Japan which had an extremely despotic, violent and hostile situation prior to our 25 year occupation of them. We taught them how to be like us and how to woop us with an economic stick rather than a sword. Unfortunately, their democracy is now suffering from the same corrution now as ours.
“GDP will grow by about 3% per year between now and then–which is pretty much what it has been doing for quite a while”.
Is that normal then? Is that OK? I just confirmed using a spreadsheet that that is actually an exponential rate of growth, which is, by further thinking, unsustainable.
I think a little economic truth is required.
Remember that all those resouces have to come out of the earth at some point. It’s not a bottomless pit.
Anyway, why do we all fall to our knees at the altar of GDP?
People like Julion Simon have definitely done that:
“Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense.”
Excuse me, what exactly does a PhD in economics know about the real world?? All he knows is some basic math and a lot of politics disguised as science. The real world, however, is governed by the laws of physics, not by money. Which means that economists should not be allowed anywhere near society’s decision making process, which should be handled by scientists who actually know how the world works. Why is it that economists tend to be on the “Resources not a problem” side, while physical scientists tend to be on the “Resources very much a problem” side? Is it simply a coincidence?
Of course, if you firmly believer that science doesn’t matter and the Universe is governed by the rules of economics (that didn’t exist for 13 billion years and still doesn’t exist in the vast majority of it), then I can’t help you (which doesn’t mean you’re not in a dire need of help)
And you pulled this number out of???
Currently we use 35% of the Earth’s land surface for agriculture, cities, and roads, we are wrecking the oceans, killing the terrestrial ecosystems, destroying topsoil, depleting aquifers, we’re at Peak Oil, gas and coal will follow, phosphorus is running out, as are a number of other high-grade ores, and in general, we are on course for complete societal collapse at some point in this century. Where exactly are the resources for 100,000 years of development??
The solution is incredibly simple. Nuke China and plant trees.
GM and et.al. Please correct me if I am wrong.There are only two “green” energies in the world…..
1) photosynthesis
2) nuclear
And photosynthesis uses nuclear(sunlight).
And as to running out of power…..LOL….there is enough uranium in a little place called Uranium City,Sask,Canada to run ALL the nuclear plants needed for the WORLD,if only we were allowed to build them!
Correction needed: 323 M = 3.23 x 10^8
Mr. Fuller,
I respect many of the points you make, but like all of us your crystal ball is cloudy, and we simply do not know what the future will bring. I am puzzled why you seem to almost ignore nuclear power? I have done the math before, and if I remember correctly, there is enough Thorium alone to supply even the most energy comsuming society with electric power for many thousands of years. Thorium reactors are safe from runaway reactions, consume old nuclear bomb materials (U235 and/or plutonium), and the technology is here NOW. Fourth generation Uranium reactors are also very attractive. This does not even consider that many top scientists believe fusion power is only a few decades away at most. Where is the problem with running out of energy?
This post and comments sucks. Who is GM? Why is he allowed to take over? Why do too many commenters bother to acknowledge or rebut him?
This is why all that trouble with CO2:
Mauna Loa has erupted 39 times since 1832….just to keep fools believing CO2, measured IN MAUNA LOA, it is increasing because of YOU.
Do YOU still believe that TALE?
Things, as told by “The Group of Rome”, to Al Baby, is like this: The only way to distribute wealth is to make believe to the people of the biggest economy of the world to live poorer lives, which means not to spend that “dirty and sinful” energy.
However, most probably, they have also cheated Al Baby (which it is not surprising). The real issue it is the total control of the world and all its resources by a very small number of people.
Renewable is dumb word.
You cannot renew the Sun. It is just there. Except at night.
Can’t renew the wind, but you can mess it up, with giant machines that are not renewable.
You can grow food for fuel but it’s a very bad idea.
Fossil fuels ARE renewable, given enough time or pressure.
Peak oil was I believe predicted for 1978 and didn’t happen. There is more now than then.
So forget “renewable”.
The answer is …Space.
Lots of Nickel in space for batteries.
Raw materials aplenty.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080213-titan-oil.html
We have already landed an automated spacecraft on Titan.
Large scale inflatable spacecraft have been tested successfully.
Only one technical hurdle remains. The Space Elevator. ( to return the gas to Earth)
Laugh at me now, but even if we go real full nuclear, you’re still going to want to cook a hot dog .
PS it is a big universe, there are no limits to growth unless you think small.
GM says: September 1, 2010 at 9:29 am
Mr Lynn said on Global Energy Use in the 21st Century
September 1, 2010 at 6:15 am
If you haven’t heard any rebuttals (as if the claim that the planet has infinite resources needs some sort of rebuttal) that’s because you have either:
1) you have lived all your life in the cave of free market ideology
2.) you have managed the impossible feat of learning how to write/type without ever learning how to read
3) you have never learned basic arithmetics
4) you are in dire need of mental hospitalization
—————————————————————————–
GM. I have read all your posts here and apart from noticing that you are extremely rude to other correspondents (which seems to be your main goal) you are also quite negative. You offer nothing.
Get a life.
Doug
Let’s look at oil for one thing. A Chevy Volt now gets 40 miles per charge. Is a 2x increase in battery capacity per decade a reasonable assumption? If so, then by 2050 we will 16x or 640 miles per charge. Anyone think that might just reduce our oil consumption a tad bit? And this assumes no other improvements.
That would mean almost all the current personal transportation would be removed from oil and placed on the grid. What’s left would probably also improve from hybrid technology improvements. And, let’s not forget about algae bio-diesel that could potentially remove the need for any *drilled* oil once the demand is reduced sufficiently.
This is the kind of technology advancements that critically thinking deficient folks like GM never consider. To them the world will never change.
I won’t even start on the potential for nuclear. I don’t want GM’s head to explode.
@Ben Klijn D.
A sensible comment, thanks.
GW can begin here.
See here for an example of such move.
That’s a rebuttal?
As someone pointed out above, the claim is not that “the planet has infinite resources ,” but rather that coupled with the mind of man the Earth’s resources are effectively inexhaustible. We are constantly finding new pools of oil under land and sea, but if one day we do run out (and if Thomas Gold is wrong about the Earth’s mantle creating more all the time), we can make it from coal, as the Germans did during WWII, or from trash (as Plasco is doing), or grow it from algae or bioengineered plants.
But that’s just oil. What else? Coal? There are hundreds of years worth in the ground. Natural gas? We discovering so much in shales that there’s a glut of it coming. Minerals? Ever hear of recycling? Apart from our deep-space vehicles, not one atom of them has left the Earth, and the oceans are a practically inexhaustible source of elements like uranium and manganese.
And, as Jeremy says (September 1, 2010 at 8:09 am),
Read John S. Lewis’s Mining The Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets. The Moon and the Asteroids are just waiting for us to develop cheaper ways of getting out of Earth’s gravity well (and if we needed more methane than bioengineered plants could make, there’s plenty of it on Titan). Quite literally, the sky’s the limit.
Take your head out of the Ludditic sand, GM, stop with the insults, and look at what your fellow men are truly capable of.
/Mr Lynn
Batteries have been around for 2 centuries. How much improvement has occurred over that period? It is completely unjustified, and extremely foolish to posit that a technofix will happen and bail us out just because, well, something has to bail us out as nothing can ever go wrong. Newsflash – there is nothing that guarantees that a technofix will be available. Nothing. So the only rational thing to do is to operate under the assumption that no technofix will be available, and if a breakthrough happens, great, but if it doesn’t we need to be ready because otherwise it will be a disaster.
And BTW, a 16x increase in battery capacity is hardly going to solve the sustainability crisis, as this only a very small aspect of it.
A very convenient fallacy is that people who warn about the Limits to Growth are some sort of Neo-Luddites who are against technology. Where this assertion comes from is beyond my ability to understand without assuming some very bad things about the mental abilities/hidden motivation of the people it comes from, as the people who warn about the Limits to Growth tend to come from highly technical backgrounds. As opposed to the people who believe that technology will always bail us out, who tend to come from economics backgrounds.
Technology is a very good thing. Blind reliance on its ability to solve all problems (which it doesn’t have) is a very bad thing
It is a safe bet that I am much better informed on the topic than you are
Julian Simon was a person who should have never been let out of the straight jacket and allowed anywhere close to a keyboard. The same goes for everyone who believes his writings, which are the equivalent to claiming that if you jump from the 88th floor of a skyscraper, nothing bad will happen to you because by the time you reach the ground you will have learned how to fly. And that’s a very precise analogy.
GM says:
September 1, 2010 at 5:26 am
And did I mention that natural gas is a non-renewable resource?
___________________________________________________
Actually maybe it’s not. According to David Suzuki, you can inject CO2 into iron rich porous stone deposits with iron reducing bacteria and get methane as a resultant product. He hates the idea since methane is a more potent GHG than CO2 … but we have been using coal bed methane for years. So there you go, CO2 may be a reuseable resource … just add methanogens, produce methane, burn it, get more CO2 and do it over again. Other sources refer to Methanogenic bacteria and don’t mention the need for iron but symbiosis with other organisms.
OK, tell how can one not use sharp language when faced with lunacy like this??? Each year we are using 5 times the oil we are consuming, and it is getting worse and worse every year. Yes, we are finding oil, but we are replacing less than 20% of what we consume. Is your brain capable of understanding this? Can you even work with numbers?? I have hard time believing it.
How could you ever say that “Oh, no problem, oil is constantly generated in the mantle” when first, that’s not what the science said, and second, the experience of hundreds and thousands of depleted and abandoned oil wells and oil fields all over the world says that even if it was, the rate at which this is happening is hardly enough to keep us going??? Does that fact that the US peaked 40 years ago and is now producing half of what it was producing back then, at much lower EROEI tell you something???
Are you capable of understanding such things as energy flow from the sun, conversion efficiency by photosynthesis, nutrient cycles etc.? If you are not, you have absolutely no right to even talk about biofuels as a solution, and neither does anyone else who doesn’t/is not willing to understand these really very simple things
Again, you pulled these numbers out of???
Once again, you have zero clue what you are talking about. Shale gas has so many issues, from EROEI, through severs ground water contamination, to, finally, the steepest decline rates ever seen (most wells are abandoned in just a few years). It’s not a solution, and what gas provides right now is hardly the only problem
Ever heard of entropy? Apparently not.
Again, you have to be absolutely out of your mind to claim such things. We can’t even send a man to Mars, and we are due for global societal collapse in the next few decades, yet you are claiming that we will mine other planets????????? By now I know that basic reasoning, arithmetics, physics, and mental sanity aren’t your strong points, but I will still encourage you to do the math of how much energy it will require to go to Titan, and transport the methane from there to here (hint: it is a hundreds of times more than the energy contained in that methane). Simply idiotic
Insults that are well deserved are insults only in the eyes of those who receive them, because usually they also suffer from a severe case of the Dunning-Kruger effect. For the people who can actually see the reality, those “insults” may actually be rather accurate descriptions of the situation
I am a very firm believer in the energy production route to follow is nuclear. The Chinese recognised this a long time ago. When the French company Framatome built the first Chinese reactor at Daya Bay in 1993 (with technical assistance from Hong Kong-based China Light and Power) the biggest problem on site was the crowds of Chinese technicians and engineers forever getting in the way while they looked and learned. The looking and learning continues, China soon will not have to purchase reactors, they will build their own, and they will be world-class.
One point which nags me is the computation of population growth. I presume that this entails looking at previous growth records and present birth rates. Has anyone thought of putting death rates into this equation?
From personal experience I can vouch for the fact that in 2000 far more people were dying at much younger ages in Zambia that at any time in the previous 20 years I’d lived there. In Ndola, a Copperbelt town, the municipality extended their cemetery by 2.5 hectares, the clearance of the land was announced when I had just returned. When I left Zambia six weeks later, Ndola Municipality announced that the cemetery was full and that no more internments would be accepted until they could afford to clear more land. Simple observations indicated that the townships where most of the urban working class live, were nowhere near as crowded as they were ten years before. The squatter townships around every urban area had either ceased expanding or were declining in size, with swathes of derelict huts visible.
Zambia’s urban population was visibly decreasing. Why? The principal cause was AIDS, colloquially known as ‘slow puncture’; the next cause of death was malaria (thanks USA for banning DDT); and the third in line for fatalities was the complete inability of hospitals to provide even the most rudimentary forms of medical care. Life expectancy is 38 years in Zambia. It is only 31 years in Swaziland (in the USA life expectancy at birth is 78 years). (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy).
Does this level of mortality, which is prevalent throughout the sub-Saharan continent, figure in anyone’s computations to do with energy consumption, food consumption or any other “computation” involving population figures and the purported growth thereof?