The relationship of gross national product per capita to energy consumption per capita for most countries of the world correlates very well with the status of economic and technological development. The World Bank defines devel­oping countries as low — and middle-income countries for which the annual gross national product is $5999 or less per capita (World Bank, 1989; U. S. Congress, 1991). With the exceptions of Brunei, Bahrain, Japan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, it includes all countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Papua New Guinea, Poland, Turkey, and the former Yugoslavia. All of the developing countries that have annual gross national products of less than $5999 per capita also consume less than 25 BOE/capita-year (3300 kg of oil equivalent/capita-year). In fact, there is a good correlation between the magnitude of annual energy consumption per capita and the correspond­ing gross national product per capita for both the developing and developed countries (Fig. 1.5).

Annual global energy consumption statistics by region show that although fossil fuels supply the vast majority of energy demand, the developing areas of the world consume more biomass energy than the developed or more industrialized regions (Tables 1.1 and 1.2). More than one-third of the energy consumed in Africa, for example, is supplied by biomass. But examination of the energy consumption and population statistics in modern times of the world’s 10 highest energy-consuming countries reveals some interesting trends that may not generally be intuitively realized. Excluding biomass energy con­sumption, these countries consumed about 65% of the world’s primary energy demand in 1992 and contained about one-half of the world’s population (Table 1.3). The industrialized countries and some of the more populated countries of the world are responsible for most of the world’s primary energy consump­tion (65%) and for most of the fossil fuel consumption. One extreme, however, is represented by the United States, which has only about 5% of the world’s population, and yet consumes about one quarter of the total global primary energy demand. Coal, oil, and natural gas contributed 23, 41, and 25%, respec­tively, to total U. S. energy demand in 1992, about 80% of which was produced within the United States. Oil has been the single largest source of energy for many years. The U. S. per-capita energy consumption in 1992, 56.3 BOE/capita, was second only to that of Canada, 69.8 BOE/capita, in this group of countries.

Energy consumption per capita, kg oil equivalent/cap-year FIGURE 1.5 Gross national product vs energy consumption of selected countries, 1990.

Another extreme is represented by China and India, which rank first and second in population. Their respective per-capita energy consumptions were 4.4 and 1.7 barrels of oil equivalent in 1992, the smallest in this group of countries. Of the three fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—coal contributed 78 and 60% to energy demand in China and India, while natural gas contributed only 2 and 6%, respectively. This suggests that the indigenous reserves of coal are large and those of natural gas are small in these countries.

Globally, total energy consumption exhibited an almost exponential increase from 1860 to 1990. Total consumption increased from 16 to 403 EJ, or by a

“Adapted from United Nations (1992). The sums of individual figures may not equal the totals because of rounding.

^Europe includes the former U. S.S. R.

‘Solids are hard coal, lignite, peat, and oil shale. Liquids are crude petroleum and natural gas liquids. Gases are natural gas.

^Electricity includes hydro, nuclear, and geothermal sources, but not fossil fuel-based electricity, which is included in fossil fuels.

‘Biomass includes fuelwood, charcoal, bagasse, and animal, crop, pulp, paper, and municipal solid wastes, but does not include derived biofuels.

^Estimated by the author: 2.95 EJ for the U. S.A., 0.5 EJ for Canada, and 0.3 EJ for Mexico. More details are presented in Chapter 2.

factor of about 25 (Klass, 1992) (Fig. 1.6). The world’s population exhibited about a fivefold increase to 5.3 billion people over this same period. From 1860 to the mid-1930s, the world’s population, total fossil fuel consumption,

“Derived from Table 1.1.

kDoes not include derived biofuels such as ethanol or methane.

“Energy consumption data adapted from U. S. Department of Energy (1994). Population data are for mid-1994 (U. S. Bureau of the Census, 1994). Sums of individual figures may not equal totals because of rounding.

EJ/YEAR

500 і——————-

and per-capita fossil fuel consumption gradually increased, but then increased much more rapidly after the beginning of World War II (Figs. 1.7 and 1.8).

Since the 1940s, fossil energy resources have clearly become the world’s largest source of energy. Interestingly, the average overall per-capita fossil fuel consumption by the world’s population started to level off in the range of 60 GJ/capita-year (10 BOE/capita-year) in 1970 (Fig. 1.8). Meanwhile, the contribution of biomass energy, which was over 70% of the world’s total energy demand in 1860, decreased to about 7% of total demand in the early 1990s.