On Energy, part 2: We are not average

By Levien van Zon
Reading time: 10 minutes

This is the second of two articles in which I try to shed some light on our current use of energy. In the previous article I introduce the kilowatt-hour (kWh), and looked at how much energy we use on average. We observed that, globally, around 82% of our energy is derived from fossil fuels. In this article I shall look at the large differences between regions and countries, and at the dismal state of renewable energy in industrialised nations so far.

In the previous article I showed that we use around 60 kWh of energy per person per day, but actually this figure is a bit misleading. This is the average energy use of a human being, but very few people are average human beings. In fact, most humans use less energy than average. But if you’re reading this, chances are that you don’t belong to this group. In fact, you probably use quite a bit more energy than average.

On this satellite image compilation you can see that some parts of the planet use much more electricity than other parts, at least for lighting roads and buildings at night. Source: NASA, 1995.

You are not average

As you can see in this figure, countries and regions vary quite a lot in how much energy they use per person:

The red bar in this figure is the average worldwide energy use. Most countries above it are either relatively wealthy, or they have a lot of industry or oil reserves. Most countries below it are lower-income countries. And most people live in low-income countries. In fact, three quarters of humanity lives in Asia (around 51.7%), Africa (15.5%) and Latin America (8.6%). Asians use 40 kWh/person/day, but if you leave out China this average drops to 22, and in a country like Bangladesh it’s only 7 kWh. Africans use 21 kWh/person/day, but someone in Central Africa uses only 8.5, and in some countries it’s even below 5 kWh/person/day. And most of the energy used in Africa is actually firewood for cooking. It seems that there is a strong relationship between “development” and energy use¹. A minority of humans use most of the world’s energy supply, while most people still use as much energy (or less) as humans did a century ago.

To be fair, the level of “human development” certainly isn’t the only factor in energy use. Climate and geography play an important role in our need for energy. The countries where energy use per person is highest all have cold winters and/or warm summers and tend to have a relatively low population density. Such countries may need more energy for heating in winter or cooling in summer, and for transportation year-round. And then there’s industry, which also tends to require a lot of energy. This is especially important for a country such as China, which not only houses a fifth of the world’s population but also most of its manufacturing industry.² Many manufacturing processes require high temperatures, which in turn require a lot of energy. The industrial products are generally meant for export, which means that the average Chinese person actually uses a lot less energy than shown in the figure above, while the average consumer in a Western country may use quite a bit more.

Even if we don’t count the “indirect” energy use from consumption, the differences in energy use between countries are sometimes enormous. For instance, the United States are home to a mere 4.4% of the world’s population, less than Bangladesh and Pakistan combined. But the US uses over 16% of the world energy supply, while Bangladesh and Pakistan together use only 0.9%. The average North American uses over thirty times as much energy as the average Bangladeshi. It’s obvious that energy consumption will be higher in countries with lots of public infrastructure, where most people have their own car and house, and where most building have heating or air-conditioning, compared to countries where people are struggling to get by. And if living conditions are to improve in a country like Bangladesh, energy consumption needs to increase there, rather than decrease. It would obviously be rather unfair to state that such countries should not be allowed to increase their standard of living. But it would also be unrealistic to expect richer countries to voluntarily decrease their standard of living. As we shall see in later articles, the richer countries can actually decrease their energy use quite a lot without sacrificing living standards. But the energy problem is not only about how much we use, it is also about where the energy comes from. And in this respect there are significant differences between countries as well:

Let’s start with some similarities: Most countries shown here need quite a bit of oil, up to 9 litres per person per day, which comes down to between 10 and 86 kWh of oil-derived energy per day for each person. This oil is used mostly for transport. On top of oil, most countries use a fair amount of coal, natural gas or nuclear energy, or a combination of these, to generate heat and electricity. Only very few countries use significant amounts of renewable energy. Iceland clearly stands out, being a volcanic island with a cold climate, a tiny population and abundant supplies of geothermal energy. A few other countries in this figure also stand out when it comes to renewable energy. Norway gets around a third of its energy from hydro power, and Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden and New Zealand manage a little over 10%. New Zealand also gets around 20% of its energy from geothermal sources. But actually most renewable energy isn’t geothermal or hydro-power, and it certainly doesn’t come from solar or wind power. Even in most advanced industrial countries, it turns out that the biggest “green” energy source is still firewood! This is followed in second place by waste material (including household waste and agricultural waste). In other words, most “renewable energy” comes from burning biomass and waste, much as it did 200 years ago. A country such as Finland has little hydro power and almost no windmills or solar panels, but it does have trees, lots of trees. As for some other countries:

While it can certainly be sensible to generate some energy from waste and plant material, there’s no way we can run our current high-energy societies entirely on firewood. There simply aren’t enough trees in the world to do that. We need sustainable energy sources that are more scalable. Let’s therefore ignore the energy generated from biomass and waste for a moment. If we do that, things actually look pretty dismal when it comes to renewable energy. Worldwide, a little over 1% of energy comes from “other” renewable sources, including wind, solar and geothermal power. PV solar panels currently provide a little over 0.1% of global energy, which comes down to about around 0.04 kWh per person per day. A teaspoon of gasoline actually contains more energy than that.

My home country of The Netherlands does only slightly better than the world average, it derives 0.7% of its energy from renewable sources outside of biomass and waste. In the UK this is 1.5%. Even Germany, generally considered to be a front-runner, only gets 3% of its energy from wind, solar and hydro power, which incidentally is the same percentage as France.⁴ Spain and Portugal on the other hand, currently the poorest nations in Western Europe, do relatively well. Profiting from its relatively sunny climate, Spain is actually the European leader in solar energy at almost 2 kWh per person per day (2.4% of the country’s energy consumption). That’s still a small percentage, but when we consider other renewable sources, Spain currently gets 9% of its energy from wind, hydro power, thermal solar power and PV solar power. Portugal even manages a little over 10%. Granted, European countries with higher mountains and more water still tend to do a little better (Norway, Sweden and the Alpine countries)³, mainly because they have more hydro-power. Still, it’s interesting and hopeful to see that Portugal, Spain and even Greece (with 5.8%) are outperforming countries like Germany and Denmark, at least in generating their energy from sustainable sources outside of biomass and waste.

We can clearly see that we have a long way to go if we want to switch all countries to a renewable energy supply. Even if we do count biomass and waste, the percentages of renewable energy are very small compared to the amount of fossil fuels we use. Let’s take The Netherlands as an example. The Netherlands is a tiny country with some 17 million people. But it actually uses more oil than nearly all of the of the 40+ countries in sub-Saharan Africa taken together (if we exclude South Africa and Nigeria). And in fact, the wealth and the economy of The Netherlands depend very much on this. We currently need large amounts of oil to power the millions of cars, vans, trucks, tractors and boats that transport our people and goods and work our land. And then there’s all the coal and gas we use to heat our homes, offices and greenhouses, and to generate our electricity. Even a relatively small and wealthy country like The Netherlands would be hard-pressed to find sufficient alternative power sources to generate the more than 140 kWh per person per day it currently gets from fossil fuels.⁵ And these figures don’t even include the energy use of international air traffic and shipping. This large-scale use of fossil fuels is the biggest reason why an average Dutch person emits over 46 kg CO₂-eq. of greenhouse gasses per day.

So why is energy a problem?

Fossil energy is a problem for at least two important reasons. First of all the supply of fossil fuels is not infinite. In fact, we haven’t discovered any major new conventional oil fields since the 1960s, and oil and gas are increasingly mined from old reservoirs and non-traditional sources such as oil shale and tar sands. We’re basically getting better at pulling fuel out of the ground, as a result of technical improvement. We can keep on doing this for at least a few decades, but it does come at a cost: The energy needed to get fossil fuels out of the ground is increasing, in some cases quite rapidly. For oil and gas it has more than doubled in the last 15-20 years. This is reflected in a measure called the energy return on energy investment (EROI or EROEI). The EROI tells us how much energy we get back for the energy we invest. It was as high as 33:1 for conventional oil and gas back in 1999, which means that for each kWh that we invested in looking for oil, pumping it out of the ground, and refining and transporting it, we ended up with a useful energy surplus of 33 kWh.

In order to sustain a complex society we actually need a fairly high return on energy investment. The reason for this is that you need a significant energy surplus to transport things, to feed everyone who doesn’t farm, to produce equipment, to do research, to build and maintain houses, offices, hospitals, schools, factories, stores, roads, power lines, gas pipes, computer networks and all the other infrastructure we’ve come to depend on in modern society. It has been estimated that the minimum EROI needed for the basic functioning of an industrial society is around 5:1. And that’s really a minimum, if you want to sustain more complex public infrastructure such as education and healthcare, you probably need at least 10:1 or 11:1.

Fossil fuels contain a lot of energy, so as long as you can get them out of the ground with ease, they yield a high return on energy investment. The problem is however that the average global EROI for oil and gas is going down. While it was around 33:1 in 1999, it had dropped to around 18:1 in 2005, and it is still declining. For US shale gas the EROI was estimated at 12:1 a few years ago. It probably went up a little in recent years, as low oil and gas prices forced efficiency improvements, but sooner or later it will decrease again as initial “sweet spots” are depleted. An EROI of 12:1 is already close to the minimum, and things get significantly worse when we make electricity from fossil fuels. The problem is again efficiency: we generally lose more than half our energy in conversion and transport. Electricity generated from conventional gas actually has an EROI around 7:1, and electricity from shale gas is probably around 5:1.⁶

The falling global EROI for fossil fuels means that if we stick with current energy sources and if we do not decrease the current level of energy use, it may become a real challenge to keep our industrial societies running within a few decades. The effects of falling EROI will probably be noticeable well before that, as economic growth is coupled to energy surplus.

So our high energy needs are a problem, especially in combination with decreasing energy returns and a growing world population. But there’s perhaps a more pressing problem with our current energy situation: Every year, human activities release around 40 billion tonnes of greenhouse gasses (CO₂-equivalent) into the atmosphere. An estimated 69% of these emissions are the result of burning fossil fuels. We know with certainty that these emissions have a warming effect on the Earth’s climate. Apart from sea-level rise, we’re not entirely sure what the exact effects of climate change will be in the longer term, as I discussed in an earlier article. This in itself is a problem. Models suggest some fairly nasty possible scenarios, including significant disruption of agriculture and biodiversity in large regions. In fact, it seems that this is already happening to some extent. Prolonged drought is causing structural water shortages in some regions (e.g. South Africa), while heavy rainfall is causing problems with flooding and erosion in other parts of the globe. To avoid serious climate disruption, we probably need to keep the warming of the global climate below 2 degrees Celsius. And to do this, we’d probably need to keep the total amount of human greenhouse gasses emitted after 2011 below 1 billion tonnes. At current rates of emission, this “carbon budget” will be used up in 2036.⁷

Of course, if we manage to reduce our emissions, we may be able to stretch this budget a little longer. On the other hand, recent observations suggest that climate warming is actually proceeding faster than predicted by the IPCC models (which were used to estimate the carbon budgets). If this is indeed the case, we may have only a decade or two left to basically reduce human greenhouse gas emissions to zero. Given our enormous dependence on fossil energy, this is going to be an extremely difficult undertaking. It would probably require a dramatic increase in the energy efficiency of just about every human activity, as well as large-scale carbon capture, reversing deforestation, decreasing consumption, scaling up wind and especially solar energy more than a hundred-fold over existing levels, and building a completely new infrastructure for global energy transport and storage. And this all has to happen in a very short period of time, a few decades at most.

Following the Paris climate treaty, most governments have announced more or less ambitious goals to reduce fossil fuel use and scale up alternative energy sources. But it’s going require hard work and significant investment to meet those goals. Given the extremely high energy requirements of industrialised societies, just putting a few solar panels on a roof somewhere isn’t going to be enough to solve our energy and climate problems (by far, as I will discuss in a later article).

In its World Energy Outlook 2017, the International Energy Agency (IEA) describes three possible scenarios for what the world energy system will look like in 2025 and 2040. Their most conservative “Current Policies” scenario takes into account only existing legislation for energy transition. This would lead to nearly a three-fold increase in solar and wind energy by 2040. This may sound impressive, until you realise that it would also lead to a significant growth in fossil fuel consumption.⁸ The use of fossil energy would grow by 36% and would still provide 79% of all energy in 2040 under current policies. Wind and solar would only provide a little over 4%. Unsurprisingly, greenhouse gas emissions would increase by 33% relative to today. The more optimistic “Sustainable Development” scenario analyses what policies would be needed to hit the targets of the Kyoto agreement. It would require a significant reduction in the use of coal by 2040, as well as a reduction in oil use, a slight increase in the use of natural gas and almost a doubling in nuclear energy and hydro-power. Wind and solar would have to grow almost ten-fold, although they would still “only” provide around 14% of total energy in 2040, compared to 61% for fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas emissions would be around 43% lower than they are today, although this would require significant effort.

It is actually rather risky to pretend that we can easily switch to renewable energy by just installing a few windmills and solar panels. It allows governments and corporations to get away with superficial and cosmetic measures, rather than making difficult, structural changes. Energy transition is not easy. New inexpensive large-scale energy sources will not magically materialise from research and innovation, at least not within the coming one or two decades. Energy transition will require blood, sweat, tears and a lot of investment, from everybody, from governments to companies and public institutions, and from researchers to house-owners. It’s time we started taking this more seriously, it’s time we really got to work and it’s time we all knew our numbers so we can actually be critical citizens.

Recap: What have we learned so far?

We use a lot of energy, especially in industrialised countries that are located far from the equator. Currently, over 80% of this energy is derived from fossil fuels. The rest is largely derived from burning firewood and waste materials. The widespread use of fossil fuels is actually a fairly recent development, it was established mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. Energy use in Western, industrialised countries is much higher than elsewhere in the world. With a few exceptions (mostly countries with a lot of hydro-power), renewable energy sources outside waste and biomass provide only a very small fraction of the energy used in industrialised countries, sometimes a few percent but more generally less than one percent. Especially with regard to wind and solar energy there is certainly a lot of room for improvement.

While we’re not out of fossil fuels yet, the effective energy we get from especially oil and gas is declining, because most of the “easy” fossil fuels have already been mined and burnt. More importantly, if we want to avoid serious climate change, we may not be able to burn much of the fossil fuel reserves that we do have left. We would have to find other large-scale energy sources, and fast.

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