• You need the flash player plugin to see the figures and they may need a short while to load.

• Units are MTOE (Million Tonnes of Oil Equivalent).

Observations

• We see that world-wide fossil fuel consumption has been steadily growing, with an accelerated growth of coal until 2013.

• Only from 2013 to 2016 has coal consumption slightly dropped again.

• By changing the region on thy y-axis, you find interesting regional differences:

  • Driven by cheap shale gas, in the US gas consumption has increased and coal consumption has been substantially reduced in recent years.

  • In contrast, there was a breathtakingly, rapid expansion of coal consumption in China until 2013. Although on a much smaller level, coal consuption in India sees a similar rapid growth that is not yet declining.

• If you set the y-axis to a log scale, you see that renewable energies had high growth rates in recent years in many countries (including NON-OECD countries like China and India)

• Yet, moving back to a linear scale on the y-axis, we see that the level of renewable energies are still on a relatively low level.

• Nevertheless, in Germany renewables have already overtaken nuclear energy, which is phasing out. Another effect of nuclear exit is that unlike for the total of OECD countries coal consumption has not really declined in Germany since 2010.

Sources:

The data for this figure is taken from BP. The figures are interactive based on the Google Chart Tools. I processed the data and created these pages with R via RStudio using the amazing knitr and googleVis packages.