Status quo
In 2019, global energy consumption reached 13.862 billion tons of oil equivalent. Among them, oil 4.47 billion tons of oil equivalent, coal 3.83 billion tons of oil equivalent, natural gas 3.43 billion tons of oil equivalent, the total proportion of fossil energy accounted for 84.62%, down 2 percentage points from 2010.
At the same time, natural gas has developed rapidly, and the consumption in 2019 was 6.35 times that of 1965, accounting for 24.7% from 15%.
Cleaner natural gas replaces a lot of oil and coal.
Figure 1 Relationship between world GDP growth and energy consumption growth from 1963 to 2017 Data from BP World Energy Statistics 2018 and the World Bank, GDP in 2010 US dollars
Development trend
For the future energy development trend, we focused on the analysis of the "change" and "unchanged" since 2016, sticking to the "unchanged" and adjusting in the "change".
In the past 10 years, the major trends in global energy development have not changed
- For the growth of energy demand in the future, many well-known research institutions in the world have predicted (Figure 2) : renewable energy and natural gas will become the main sources to meet the growth of global energy demand in the future, and "low-carbon" and "diversified" are the important trends and characteristics of future energy development.
With the rapid development of new energy sources such as solar energy, wind energy, geothermal energy, ocean energy and energy storage, energy is being supplied from centralized resources such as coal, oil and gas, and electricity in the past, to centralized and "decentralized" development.
BP, British Petroleum; CNPC, China National Petroleum Corporation Limited; EIA, U.S. Energy Information Administration; IEA, International Energy Agency; IEEJ, Institute of Energy Economics of Japan; IHS Markit, Axin Huamai; OPEC, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries; Statoil, Norway's national oil company; XOM, Exxon Mobil Corporation
- With the application of various information technologies in the field of energy, especially the "digital" technology has gradually broken the barriers between different energy varieties, and has become a major development trend in the future.
In the energy industry, "no country can be independent on the energy issue" and "technology has no national boundaries" has become a consensus.
- The concept of Global Energy Internet and the establishment of the Global Energy Internet Development and Cooperation Organization is an important symbol of energy "internationalization".
Jeremy Rifkin, a famous American scholar, first put forward the vision of energy Internet in his book The Third Industrial Revolution, which has aroused wide attention at home and abroad.
International cooperation in energy science and technology is becoming more and more extensive and intense, and the $10 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor Cooperation Project (ITER) is a typical case.
Low carbon, diversification, decentralization, digitalization and globalization will be the main direction of energy development in the future.
