Energy consumption economic development

Recognizing these data constraints, it seems that biomass contributes about one-third of the primary energy consumption in developing coimtries but varies from over 90% in less developed countries such as Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Nepal to about 45% in India, 30% in China and Brazil, and 10-15% in Mexico and South Africa. By comparison, the share of primary energy provided by biomass within industrialized countries is estimated to be only about 3%. Importantly, however, the absolute consumption per capita varies by a much smaller amount worldwide. Indeed, cross-sectional studies seem to indicate that economic development does not usually result in less overall absolute use of biomass fuel, although its fraction of total energy declines and use shifts from households to other sectors. Overall, current commercial and noncommercial biomass fuel supplies about 20-60 EJ/y worldwide. Recent lEA estimations, for example, indicate approximately 40 EJ/y (Table II). 

Although the economic downturn in Asia that began in mid-1997 has lowered expectations for near-term growth in the region, almost half the world s increase in energy consumption is still projected to be in developing Asia. 

Lee, C-C., and Chang, C-P., 2007. Energy consumption and GDP revisited A panel analysis of developed and developing countries, Energy Economics, 29 (6), 1206-1223. 

Developing biomass energy can provide economic, political, social and environmental advantages. The energy potential of biomass has been estimated at almost 42 quadrillion Btus which is about 1/2 of the total energy consumption in the United States. Biomass provides the U.S. with about the same amount of energy as the nuclear industry. 

Figure 1 illustrates the strong correlation between national economic development and energy consumption. An attempt to normalize the scale effect has been made by presenting the data on a per capita basis. Thus... 

Energy consumption and ecological and economic factors determine an expediency and sometimes a technical necessity to decrease the number of process operations and to change to processes in which several stages, previously quite separate, are combined or superimposed in a single process. At present this approach is only a tendency which does not exclude the traditional course of industrial development. Nevertheless, the tendency is seen quite clearly in the increasing volume of products produced by such integrated production process and in the share of total production from these processes. 

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