Global Energy Reserves and Trends

The time for holding conferences and writing articles is over. The Secretary General of the United Nations, on September 24, 2007, put it this way The time for doubt has passed. It is time to build those demonstration plants that will clearly establish the feasibility and costs of the various alternative energy systems. It is time to start to replace fossil fuels with clean and renewable energy sources such as solar-hydrogen. 

When discussing global energy consumption, the unit of energy most often used is the quad (Q). One Q equals 1 quadrillion Btu (1015 Btu), 1.055 exajoules (EJ), 172 million barrels of oil equivalent (boe), or 0.293 petawatt hour (pWh = 1012 kWh) of electricity. One Q is also equivalent to the yearly energy produced by over two dozen nuclear power plants, the energy content of 10,000 supertankers of oil, 400,000 railcars of coal, or 28 billion cubic meters of natural gas. 

Worldmarketed energy use by fuel type, 1980-2030. (From Energy InformationAdministration (EIA), International Energy Annual 2004 (May-July 2006), http //www.eia.doe.gov/iea. Projections EIA, System for the Analysis of Global Energy Markets (2007).) 

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