My last post got linked, republished and talked about, apparently. We got a lot of traffic as a result.
I suppose I should be tempted to sink back into the morass of the climate wars and go for the big traffic that might justify my adding ads to the site. For now I’m going to resist. There are too many places where people can go to talk about climate change, and too few where energy is the focus. And I think this might be the only one with a micro focus on energy consumption.
Energy consumption. The worry of mine that gave birth to this weblog is that we are underestimating future energy consumption and as a result are sleepwalking into a world where coal becomes (again) the default fuel used to power the rise of the developing world. We’re not doing the infrastructure planning that will allow nuclear, hydroelectric, wind/solar/biofuels and even natural gas to take some of the burden off of old king coal.
Specifically, in the near term I project that the world will use 947 quads in 2035, far more than the 712 estimated by the DOE EIA, the IEA and the U.N. I also project it will only get worse after 2035, leading to an incredible 3,000 quads every year by 2075.
Of course this will have an effect on climate–even if atmospheric sensitivity is as low as I think (and hope), the brute force effect of the emissions associated with that much consumption of coal will impact our climate.
I’ve tried to show it and discuss it. So far, more than 22,000 visits to this blog have maybe convinced a few hundred people that I have a case. I hope so.
On to today’s topic. The Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration has published their Early Release of the U.S. Annual Energy Outlook for 2013.
Some key points:
- Domestic production of crude oil is increasing and is expected to continue to increase, reaching 7.5 million barrels per day by 2019
- Our consumption of natural gas is also expected to increase, from 6.8 trillion cubic feet per year in 2011 to 7.8 trillion cubic feet in 2019
- They have increased their projections of generation from solar and wind, from 13% of the total in 2011 to 16% in 2040. The EIA is not so optimistic about advanced biofuels, lowering the predicted output from all biomass from their 2012 prediction of 5.4 quads to 4.2 quads by 2035
- With improved efficiency of energy use and a shift away from the most carbon-intensive fuels, U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide
(CO2) emissions remain more than 5 percent below their 2005 level through 2040
- They have upped their prediction of GDP growth per year, from 2.5% to 2.6% CAGR through 2040.
- As for the reason I was so eager to look at the report… they obviously don’t agree with me. They predict that total energy consumption will rise by a total of 7% by 2035, from 98 quads in 2011 to 104 quads in 2035 and then by 6% to 2040 to a total of 108 quads. (I think it will be higher.)
- Their justification still centers around their belief that energy intensity will decline as total U.S. population increases by 29 percent from 2011 to 2040, but energy use grows by only 10 percent, with energy use per capita declining by 15 percent from 2011 to 2040. I want some of what they’re smoking
Overall, I still think they’re looking too much at the inputs to their models–pricing and supply constraints, availability etc., instead of accepting that the demand for fuel is not very price sensitive and will be driven by population and GDP growth. Energy efficiency will surely help us out. But we’ve picked a lot of the low hanging fruit from that tree, and future progress in energy efficiency will be progressively more difficult.