1.1 A world divided in energy 3
From the population distribution it is clear that countries such as China and
India contain a disproportionate amount of people compared to the geographic
area. In comparison to this map, an illustration of fuel consumption distribution,
gure 1.2, shows that the amount of energy spent throughout the world
is markedly dierent from the distribution of people. In the fuel consumption
map the US is approximately the size of India and China combined and the
European region is signicantly larger than South America and Africa where
very little energy is consumed. The eect of this skewed energy/population
ratio can also be seen from gure 1.3, where a measure of living standard, the
Human Development Index, is plotted for a selection of countries as function of
the electricity consumption per capita.
Figure 1.3: Plot of the Human Development Index, HPI, as function of electricity
consumption per person per year. The HPI is a measure of living standards. Figure
taken from 2
Although the data from gure 1.3 is from 2005, the dierence in energy consumption
is astonishing. More recent data from the BP Statistical Review of
World Energy 2015 3 is shown in gure 1.4, where consumption per capita of
oil, natural gas and coal is shown for the US, China and India in year 2013.
From this data, the US consumes more than three times as much energy per
capita as China, who in turn consumes more than four times as much as India.
Understandingly, countries with very low living standards wish to improve
their situation; the world energy consumption is therefore bound to increase.