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.
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. More than one-third of the energy consumed in Africa, for example, is supplied by biomass. But examination of the energy demand & 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.
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. 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 factor of about 25 (Klass, 1992). 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, and per-capita fossil fuel consumption gradually increased, but then increased much more rapidly after the beginning of World War II.
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. 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.
