A friend of mine, always with a keen eye on interesting things, passed on an interesting quote from the CERA Week energy conference the other week. The head of the International Energy Forum mentioned a surprising statistic, as quoted by Javier Blas on Twitter: “Heathrow airport in London uses more energy than the whole African nation of Sierra Leone [population ~8.5 million].” Yikes!
Here’s another one that turned up randomly in the feed by a credible source: “If we keep growing our energy usage (2.9% CAGR last 350 years) we will use more energy in the next 25 years than in all prior human history. 3x in 39 years and 9x by the end of the century.”
Energy is an amazing topic, both sources and uses. The sheer scale of what we require for our present lifestyle is mind-blowing when placed in concrete contexts like above. In the abstract, the numbers don’t mean anything. The world consumes over 100 million barrels of oil per day. So what? Is that a lot? Sure it’s a big number but so is 8 billion people. Either stat is hard to wrap one’s head around.
Consider the following with respect to oil consumption/production: ExxonMobil made waves recently for a large oil discovery offshore Guyana, in an era when there aren’t that many discoveries being made (the flip side of the demand for oil/gas companies to return money to shareholders means exploration generally takes a back seat). Reuters picked up the story: ExxonMobil announced a new discovery, one of 30 since 2015, in a 6.6 million acre area that to date has been found to hold 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil, which also equals the country’s total. The results are significant, moving Guyana up to 17th on the world’s petroleum reserve rankings, similar to Norway, Brazil, or Algeria.
Now compare that number to consumption. At 100 million b/d, the world consumes a billion barrels of oil every ten days. Eleven billion barrels of recoverable reserves will meet the world’s needs for about 110 days, or just under four months. And global demand continues to grow.
The scope of this discussion goes far beyond oil demand. It is imperative that people understand energy demand, and particularly so on a global scale.
Look at this history of global energy consumption chart from Our World in Data:
It’s nuts. But it coincides very well with the rising standard of living attained by humanity, particularly in the west, an increase the rest of the world wants to emulate.
Consider the following statistics if you think that trajectory is going to slow down or reverse any time soon.
Africa has about 1.2 billion people, or roughly 15 percent of the earth’s population. Yet Africa accounts for 2 percent of global air traffic. By contrast, Europe has a population of about 740 million, and accounts for 31 percent of global air traffic.
What if Africans decide they want to live like Europeans, air-travel-wise, which is not just justified on moral grounds but actually more functionally logical, because Europe covers only 1/3 of Africa’s size of 30 million square kilometres?
What if the rest of the world wants to enjoy air conditioning to the extent the US does (and why on earth wouldn’t they)? According to the US Energy Information Agency, nearly 90 percent of US households use air conditioning, and virtually every office building does as well. The US has about 130 million households for 330 million people, or about 2.5 people per household. If Africa had a similar ratio, they would have 480,000 households, and if a similar proportion had AC there would be 430,000 households with AC. It’s safe to say that today in Africa the number of households with AC is far closer to zero than 90 percent. (Even communists/hardcore socialists support near-universal air conditioning, though they call it a ‘right’ by way of that fuzzy but firm ‘gimme that’ appropriation way of theirs.)
Now add in India, with another 1.4 billion people, and do the same math. A billion air conditioners worth of global demand is not a ridiculous estimate, not when considering Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, parts of South America… in addition to Africa, India…
Consider even food, and the logistical magnum opus required to keep countries food-riot-free. A typical western website says that the average person consumes 3-4 pounds of food per day. Let’s say the rest of the world isn’t so lucky, and we’ll call it 2.5 pounds per day for a global average (each new cruise ship drags the world average up considerably). There are 8 billion of us schlepping around planet earth. A semi trailer can carry about 45,000 pounds of cargo. So every day, the equivalent of about 444,000 semis full of food are forklifted out of trucks and down the gullets of 8 billion upturned mouths. Every freaking day, without a break.
And that’s just food. What about IKEA. And Costco. And Home Depot. And Walmart. And all the other stuff in our world.
And billions more people are striving to fill up the SUV (yes, everywhere you go, SUV) at their local Costco/Home Depot/Walmart, as soon as one arrives in their community.
Ah hell, I give up. The scale of all this stuff is unfathomable. And yet it all gets where it needs to go, every day, as long as there’s energy.
Any singular household staple must be there, in abundance, or all hell breaks loose. Remember Covid > toilet paper? What happens as soon as there is even a rumour of a shortage? Social deviants, which are harder to eradicate than (and just as useful as) STDs, get into gear and begin hoarding in order to resell at a profit. It just happens, one of the unfortunate costs of living in a free society. (I’m not suggesting that those people should be found and beaten with a tire iron, but then again I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t.)
When we think of energy consumption, we tend to think of our hilariously comfortable lives in western nations, where supermarkets are perpetually full, where gasoline and heating fuels are available 24/7/365 at reasonable prices, where flying wherever and whenever we want, with minimal hassle, is one step away from being viewed as a human right. We are correct in that our energy consumption per capita in the west is very high. But on an outright total consumption basis, individual country statistics are pretty wild. And saddening, in some ways.
First the wild part: You would expect (or I did anyway) the US to be either at the top of the consumption pile or close; it is and has been an economic juggernaut for a century. But not even close: in 2022, the US consumed about 96 exajoules of energy, which is a lot – that number equals the consumption of India, Russia, Japan and Canada combined. But way out in front is China, with 2022 consumption of 159 exajoules. No one should be surprised China leads the world in renewables installation and coal fired power plant construction. They need it all.
Where it gets sad is to wander further down the list to the lowest consumers. The site linked above shows a graphic of the world, with each country colour-coded for total energy consumption. The lowest on the colour scale is a pale yellow representing 20 exajoules per year. The scale rises up through blues and towards a dark navy which represents China at the top of the heap.
Most African countries, and some South American ones, do not even warrant a definition in the legend at all, and are simply greyed out. They have so little energy consumption they hardly even make it onto the raw data table. Hundreds of millions of people live like that. But only as long as they have to.
It is very sobering to see how much of the world lives, and how very far they are from the West’s standard of living. The West’s leaders push the concept of ‘electrify everything’, a concept that only makes sense if one is looking no further than their backyard and has zero feel for the true global situation. In much of the world, they would just as happily get behind the slogan ‘electrify anything’.
It is hard to imagine this energy consumption trajectory falling; we’d be very lucky if it stayed flat. But that seems like an unrealistic hope. The developing world clearly has every incentive and right to advance towards the West’s standard of living, and if they get close global energy consumption will head off further into the stratosphere. Here in the West, we play cute little games like a forced switch to EVs, while ignoring almost totally any common sense commentary on the subject (For example, Toyota’s 1:6:90 rule which states that for the same amount of raw materials to manufacture one EV, Toyota can make six plug-in hybrids or 90 hybrids, and in doing so would achieve 37 times the emissions reduction of a single EV. Yet Toyota is scorned for such logic on the grounds that “Toyota’s reluctance to fully embrace EVs can hinder innovation in the EV industry.” Note that there is no challenge to the facts themselves, just a bruising of the ego of the think tanks.)
Anyone that provides energy of any kind should roll up their sleeves, there’s a lot of work to be done, and those who wish to hunt for energy villains will get run over, in due course.
Energy conversations should be positive, grounded in reality, and as funny as possible. Life depends on it, both the energy and the humour. Find out more in “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks!
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.
Just a guess, but coal and nuclear will be in a lot of people’s future.
As will natural gas, but that hardly needs saying.
The top-of-chart sources – should be moved to the bottom with “traditional biomass.”
Most of these are fairly useless except in special cases and a waste of wealth.
This seems a low number for Africa.
Should be 480,000,000 households. I am not much of a typist myself and could always use more proofreading before hitting the “post” button. But a submission requires a bit more care.
“If Africa had a similar ratio, they would have 480,000 households, and if a similar proportion had AC there would be 430,000 households with AC”
I think those figures should have been 480 million and 430 million. Check the ratios in the text.
Not to pick nits but…
Seems to me that 330M/130M (people to households) would equate to 1.2B/480,000,000 (people to households) instead of 480,000
“Most African countries, and some South American ones, do not even warrant a definition in the legend at all, and are simply greyed out. They have so little energy consumption they hardly even make it onto the raw data table.”
But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? The political Left would have the whole world live like that. They’re doing everything they can, from every angle, to bring us down to the lowest common denominator. They know that they can’t do it all at once; it’s a generations-long process that requires chipping away at everything- beginning with energy itself.
It’s bad enough that they want you and me dead, they want Africans dead too, and they prefer they don’t live in the first place.
That’s why Marx called those who supported his tyrannical in all but name ideas as “useful idiots.” Because they have no awareness of how those who want to reshape the world according to the socialist “ideals” will place them solidly within those that must be “culled.”
It was actually Lenin who is commonly attributed with that reference, referring to sympathizers in non-communist countries, though its true origin is somewhat cloudy.
‘useful idiot’: meaning and origin – word histories
One of the mantras of the left, is that everyone except them, should be equal. And since it is easier to tear down than it is to build up, that is their direction of choice.
Get your math right. It obviously isn’t.
Apparently it’s a direct quote from the BOE report (linked at the top of the article) so the BOE got their math wrong
As Bastiat said, Paris feeds itself. All it takes is self-interest and cooperation, something markets supply in spades and government destroys nearly as fast.
It took the French Revolution to set the heads right.
It has always been. Energy underpins EVERYTHING….Those that live in the green ideological bubble have always had, and will always have, absolutely no understanding of the sheer SCALE of the amount of energy required to sustain, let alone grow and flourish human life on earth in the 21st century and beyond.
Of course, the “progressive” green zealots and climate loonies do not want progress in the capitalist sense.
100% agreed. As a practical matter, you can only be “against fossil fuels” if you are anti-human.
People who March the Eco-Nazi goosestep and imagine themselves as do-gooders are generally clueless about where everything they have the privilege of taking for granted in modern civilization comes from.
At a recent gathering of electric utility executives, Elon Musk gently chastised them for under-estimating the magnitude of electricity demand coming. He wasn’t talking about powering EVs, but, in the main, powering AI. For context, today’s global cloud consumes 10-fold more electricity than all the world’s EVs combined. Even if EV adoption expands at the rate that the bulls think, the cloud will still outpace that electricity demand, by a lot, especially now that AI hardware is being added rapidly to the Cloud infrastructure.
The standard rejoinder to observations about the energy appetite of computers, and now especially AI, is to assert that innovators will make silicon technology more efficient. Of course they will. But efficiency doesn’t slow energy demand growth, it propels it. That reality is called Jevons Paradox. Information systems in general are the most deliciously clear example of that so-called paradox.
Of course;
“Sir, we’ve come up with a way to reduce the energy consumption of our factory by half.”
“You mean I can get three factories producing output for only half again the current energy bill? How soon can you make it happen!?”
Yup. Especially when every Climate Fascist do-gooder goes through every day with their internet connected dumb phone in hand nearly every waking minute.
OK, seems we’ve all pounded on Terry enough for having lost three zeros in the number of African households, but his point is salient. People simply have no idea of the scale of energy exploration, discovery, production and distribution. Thus, they think revising the entire system can be done pronto without giving up anything else. Oh, and cheaper energy, abundant good paying jobs, longer lives, and social equity in the bargain.
It’s dangerous ignorance.
Re “Heathrow Airport uses more energy than Sierra Leone”
It is also a little known fact that Heathrow is the UK’s largest port by value with a network of over 218 destinations worldwide and trade of over £203 bn worth of goods in 2022 of which £182 bn was to and from EU destinations. Just over 83% of that cargo was carried in the belly hold of passenger aircraft the rest was in cargo flights.
https://www.heathrow.com/company/cargo
The chart also tracks the planetary population of humans.
I was glad to see someone on WUWT carefully articulate the math problem of 2.9% compound growth in energy usage. Something will have to give.We can’t “drill baby drill” out of this. I am NOT suggesting that government programs are an answer either. One of the tragedies of NET-ZERO and related nonsense is that tries to deceive people into thinking that wind and solar can sustain any growth. This takes intellectual and inventive energy away from working on how to live well with less energy. Given the tight historical connection of prosperity (however measured) with energy use, this is a non-trivial challenge. Ideally, our “best and brightest” will be thinking of how to cope with the coming math “wall” (e.g. we don’t know how to produce 7 times current energy use) and some ideas will be in the trial phases as we hit this wall. Of course, if fossil fuel production actually starts declining at the same time (presumably there is only so much of it – we are not going to run out next year) prices will rise making good ideas for living well on less energy very marketable.
Note: I use the term “live well with less energy” an an intentionally open term. Doing so could include not just technology but cultural and social changes – something better than what some net-zero types seem to be driving us towards which is masses of very poor and starving with a small elite.
“Energy is an amazing topic, both sources and uses. The sheer scale of what we require for our present lifestyle is mind-blowing when placed in concrete contexts like above. In the abstract, the numbers don’t mean anything. The world consumes over 100 million barrels of oil per day. So what? Is that a lot? Sure it’s a big number but so is 8 billion people. Either stat is hard to wrap one’s head around.”
And here we are trying to provide energy to those eight billion (and counting) people by filling fields with solar cells, windmills and organic corn, soybeans and coffee. Perhaps we should be working toward making nuclear power less expensive, so it isn’t just clean and reliable but clean, reliable and cheap.