The Daughter of WEAP

[GliderGuider]

I've just published a substantial re-working of my strongly-critiqued article "World Energy and Population: Trends to 2100". Thanks to the constructive input I received from many reviewers it has undergone a significant transmogrification, and all for the better.

I've limited the time horizon to 2050 and explicitly incorporated the recent Energy Watch Group projection for Peak Oil as well as their earlier report on coal. I've also done a much more careful analysis of nuclear power and renewable energy sources - I encourage people who have strong opinions on the future of these sources to comment on my methodology.

Gone is any discussion of an apocalyptic die-off, though there is a still a hint of spreading famine in the air. I briefly examine the implications of energy decline if the UN’s Medium Fertility Case for population turns out to be correct and there are indeed 9 billion of us stomping around on the planet in 2050.

Introduction

Throughout history, the expansion of human civilization has been supported by a steady growth in our use of high-quality exosomatic energy. This has been due to both our increasing population and our increasing level of activity. As we learned to harness the energy sources around us we progressed from horse-drawn plows, hand forges and wood fires to our present level of mechanization with its wide variety of high-density energy sources. As industrialization has progressed around the world, the amount of energy each one of us uses has also increased, with the global average per capita consumption of all forms of energy rising by 50% in the last 40 years alone.

This rosy vision of continuous growth has recently been challenged by the theory of "Peak Oil", which concludes that the amount of oil and natural gas being extracted from the earth will shortly start an irreversible decline. AS that happens we will have to depend increasingly on other energy sources to power our civilization. In this article I will offer a glimpse into that changed energy future. I hope to be able to provide a realistic assessment of the evolution of the global energy supply picture, and to estimate how much of the various types of energy we will have available to us in the coming decades.

The full article is here: World Energy to 2050

I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts.