Energy in History - The Basic Environmental History - page 19

1.4.4 The Geography of Energy Production

At the beginning of the 19th century, commercial, that is fossil, energy production
was still entirely localised in Europe and especially in the north and centre. Eco-
nomic growth and availability of fossil sources of energy more or less coincided. At
the middle of the century, 90 % of fossil energy was still produced in Europe and
10 % in the United States (Table 1.6 ). Things changed during the 20th century, and
especially in the second half, when oil began to play a central role in the energy
systems of the developed countries. After the World War 2, Europe produced
35

40 % of world commercial energy. In particular the European production of oil
has always been negligible, despite an increase of North Sea oil exploitation in the
1980s and 1990s by Great Britain and Norway. If, as a whole, the energy de

-

cit of
developed countries was only 4 % in 1950, in 1973 it had grown to about 50 %. At
the end of the century, a little less than 50 % of oil production was localised, in
order of importance, in Saudi Arabia, the USA, the Russian Federation, Iran and
Mexico. The concentration of oil production, which is the basic source of the
energy system, in speci c places, resulted in a higher vulnerability of energy

provisioning of developed countries. This vulnerability clearly appeared in 1973
and 1979, when the oligopoly of the main energy producers, OPEC, limited oil
production and resulted in fast and remarkable price increases.
At the end of the past millennium, considerable differences existed in energy
consumption per country. The geography of energy consumption is similar to the
geography of growth; while the geography of energy production is not. Countries
with higher per capita GDP are higher consumers (Fig. 1.6 ).
Among rich and poor countries the range of commercial energy consumption per
head is 40 to 1. While in Niger and Mali it is 0.2 toe per capita per year, in the USA
it is 8 toe. In the 1980s, on the world scale, energy consumption of market
developed economies was 50 % of the total; that of centrally planned economies
20 % and that of the developing countries 30 %. At the end of the second mil-
lennium, 25 % of the world population — 1.5 billion, the population, that is, of the
developed economies, consumed 7,920 toe, i.e.75 % of the world consumption in
one year, while 75 % of the population

consumed 2,340 toe, or 25 %
of the whole. With about 4.9 toe per year, an inhabitant of the most advanced

— 4.5 billion —

Table 1.6 Total production of commercial energy per continent (%)
1800 1850 1900 1950 1985

Europe 99.09 90.00 61.63 35.66 38.38

America 0.91 10.00 35.71 52.38 30.73

Asia 0.00 0.00 1.72 9.99 23.11

Africa 0.00 0.00 0.12 1.24 5.83

Oceania 0.00 0.00 0.82 0.73 1.95

100 100 100 100 100

Source Etemad and Luciani ( 1991 )