Energy: Rubberducking Oil
When I digged into the numbers for this blog post, I found some of my misunderstandings about our relation to oil:
Renewable energy is replacing fossile fuels: False
Globally, the share of renewables increased by 14% between 2016 and 2017 (an increase of almost 70 Million Tonnes of Oil Equivalents). The global share of fossile fuels decreased slightly from 85,5% to 85,18%. But the total supply of fossile fuels increased by almost 180 MTOe. Fossile fuels is growing more than twice as much as renewables! This is a school-book example of why it is important to distinguish absolute increases from percent-wise increases.
Sweden has phased out fossile fuels and is a role model for the world: False. Sweden imports some 10 million tonnes of oil per year - one tonne per person. The global consumption is 4.5 billion tonnes per year - 600 kg per year and person.
Looking at the oil reserves, this is bad news. I'll start discussing why without mentioning Global Warming in this blog post.
An extremely simplified approach to Oil Supply
The global oil consumption was almost 36 billions of barrels in 2017. That is 4.6 barrels per person that year. The global reserves were 1 700 billions of barrels at the end of 2017 - 220 barrels per person.
According to the Norwegian energy company Rystad, an average of 6 billion barrels of oil fields were discovered between 2014 and 2018. That would make 0.8 "new" barrels per person and year.
Dividing all oil on us all, one person would have 220 barrels, consume 4.6 barrels per year and discover 0.8 barrels per year. You do the math.
It is clear to me that we are over consuming oil and that we are not even close to replace that dependency with other fuels or renewables. As we are totally dependent on oil and fossile fuels, I will dedicate some blog posts on it, peak-oil and how difficult and necessary it will be for us to break that addiction.
Side Note 1: My Carbon Project
The current prediction is 4.1 tonnes of CO2e. This prediction assumes that we buy five stuffed pieces of furniture and two hours in the air. It seems that stuffed furniture such as sofas and beds are very dirty. I'll investigate what causes them to be so CO2e-intense.
Side Note 2: Misleading Numbers From Reliable Sources
Digging even further into the numbers, I saw that BP was mixing up Sweden, Switzerland and Spain. Compare the numbers in the last three rows of the two pictures below:
In the upper table, Sweden consumed 65 MTOe of oil, Spain consumed 10.9 MTOe and Switzerland 15.6 MTOe. In the lower table, Spain consumed 65 MTOe of oil, Sweden 15.6 MTOe and Switzerland 10.8 MTOe. The latter seems more plausible given the population of Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. I have notified BP but no answer yet.
This illustrates one major difficulty when analyzing the energy flow of the world. The data is often inconsistent, green-washed and sometimes completely wrong. I will try to double-check the figures, but I will probably make mistakes in my numbers once in a while. If you find strange numbers, please inform me so that I can double check.
Side Note 3:
Rubberducking refers to a post on my other blog.
Renewable energy is replacing fossile fuels: False
Globally, the share of renewables increased by 14% between 2016 and 2017 (an increase of almost 70 Million Tonnes of Oil Equivalents). The global share of fossile fuels decreased slightly from 85,5% to 85,18%. But the total supply of fossile fuels increased by almost 180 MTOe. Fossile fuels is growing more than twice as much as renewables! This is a school-book example of why it is important to distinguish absolute increases from percent-wise increases.
Sweden has phased out fossile fuels and is a role model for the world: False. Sweden imports some 10 million tonnes of oil per year - one tonne per person. The global consumption is 4.5 billion tonnes per year - 600 kg per year and person.
 |
| Nope. |
Looking at the oil reserves, this is bad news. I'll start discussing why without mentioning Global Warming in this blog post.
An extremely simplified approach to Oil Supply
The global oil consumption was almost 36 billions of barrels in 2017. That is 4.6 barrels per person that year. The global reserves were 1 700 billions of barrels at the end of 2017 - 220 barrels per person.
According to the Norwegian energy company Rystad, an average of 6 billion barrels of oil fields were discovered between 2014 and 2018. That would make 0.8 "new" barrels per person and year.
 |
| The discovered oil and gas is declining. One plausible cause may be that the low oil price holds back the efforts to find new oil. I'll investigate this further in the near future. |
Dividing all oil on us all, one person would have 220 barrels, consume 4.6 barrels per year and discover 0.8 barrels per year. You do the math.
It is clear to me that we are over consuming oil and that we are not even close to replace that dependency with other fuels or renewables. As we are totally dependent on oil and fossile fuels, I will dedicate some blog posts on it, peak-oil and how difficult and necessary it will be for us to break that addiction.
Side Note 1: My Carbon Project
The current prediction is 4.1 tonnes of CO2e. This prediction assumes that we buy five stuffed pieces of furniture and two hours in the air. It seems that stuffed furniture such as sofas and beds are very dirty. I'll investigate what causes them to be so CO2e-intense.
Side Note 2: Misleading Numbers From Reliable Sources
Digging even further into the numbers, I saw that BP was mixing up Sweden, Switzerland and Spain. Compare the numbers in the last three rows of the two pictures below:
This illustrates one major difficulty when analyzing the energy flow of the world. The data is often inconsistent, green-washed and sometimes completely wrong. I will try to double-check the figures, but I will probably make mistakes in my numbers once in a while. If you find strange numbers, please inform me so that I can double check.
Side Note 3:
Rubberducking refers to a post on my other blog.
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