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51 comments on Physics in the Economy I: Physical Work

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Halfin on September 12, 2005 - 12:53pm Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Does anyone have any figures on economic output per barrel of oil, or per quad of energy? These could be by country or by economic region (like Europe). It would be interesting to see which economies are most efficient in terms of producing useful output with modest energy inputs. This might establish a rough baseline for how much the less efficient economies could improve if they had to.
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TI on September 12, 2005 - 1:36pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
There are a lot of research on energy efficiency. But here I woiuld like to give a link to a small info of the World Energy Council ("THE ROLE OF ENERGY IN ECONOMIC GROWTH"
http://www.worldenergy.org/wec-geis/publications/default/tech_papers/17th_congress/1_1_17.asp)

WEC has all kind of data on energy efficiency.

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Halfin on September 12, 2005 - 2:09pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I looked at this paper but it seems to be missing some important data. Although it has some data series up to 1994, all the information on oil and energy consumption cuts off in 1972. In particular table 8 shows the annual growth rate in energy consumption per capita, and the last data is 3.2% growth for 1970-1972.

This fits into the theme that oil consumption helps with economic growth, but continuing the data would, I think, cast considerable doubt on that. In fact I think I read that energy consumption per capita actually began to fall in the 1980 time frame. That would mean negative growth rates if table 8 were extended.

So why didn't they do that? The data is widely available, and they included other data series up to 1994. But how would that fit with the theme: "This paper goes a step further and argues that the cost and availability of energy is a major factor promoting economic growth." Yet when you have economic growth while reducing oil consumption as happened through much of the 80s and 90s, that casts doubt on their conclusion.

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TI on September 12, 2005 - 2:33pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You have right. The per capita energy consumption in the world has been declining from the '70s on. This is intriguing question. The economic growth slowed down markedly from the '70s. But no negative growth per capita of course(?). There are some explanations. Increasing energy efficiency is one. And then the way the world GDP is calculated. There are some hints that the GDP statisitics don't give right picture of the situation of the very poor (and they are many in the world), so the GDP per capita may not be correct. It is possible that the structural changes in economy make the GDP non-comparable to earlier periods. We might clear the US GDP from the hedonic corrections, make the CPI more realistic and get no real growth (or neagative growth) per capita in the beginning of '00s.

This is really an intriguing matter. But it shows that the energy viewpoint is useful because we can do some checking of the conventional statistics against it.

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NC on September 13, 2005 - 9:02am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
TI

"There are some hints that the GDP statisitics don't give right picture of the situation of the very poor (and they are many in the world), so the GDP per capita may not be correct."

This is a great insight I had not considered.  World population increasing rapidly with many having tiny energy use.  A small percent of population having a large and growing energy use per capita.  If true, Peak oil would hit that small population hardest.

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Rick on September 13, 2005 - 9:04pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
There's an addition explanation that NC hints at below: the average numbers are concealing (at least) two different and opposing trends. For simplicity, divide the world into 2 segments: developed and non-developed.

The developed world has essentially static population, high and increasing energy use in total, and per-capita energy use increasing. The non-developed world generally has rapidly increasing population, low energy use that is increasing, but at a rate lower than population growth, and per-capita energy use declining.

China is somewhere in the middle: without checking the figures, I'd guess it has a population held down, per-capita energy use low, energy growth rate high, increasing per-capita energy use.

If we look at averages, the important dynamics are concealed. At the moment, only the non-developed world is sinking into the Olduvai Gorge of reduced per-capita energy use--and they are doing it a lot faster than the average numbers suggest.

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Stuart Staniford on September 12, 2005 - 4:12pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I will get to this stuff in detail in a later post in the series.
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RayJ on September 13, 2005 - 11:57am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Halfin,
Here are some numbers I put together sometime ago.  Treat these as order of magnitude values only since they represent numbers for different years.  Most info is from the CIA Factbook and EIA Country Analyses.

                USA    EU    Japan    China    India    Russia    Brazil
Country GDP (PPP $trillion)    11.75    11.65    3.745    7.262    3.319    1.408    1.492
Population (million)        296    457    127    1306    1080    144    186
Per Capita GDP ($1000/yr)    39.696    25.492    29.488    5.560    3.073    9.778    8.022
Oil Usage (mb/d)        20    14.54    4.1    6.53    2.2    2.6    2.12
per capita Oil usage (b/yr)    24.66    11.61    11.78    1.83    0.74    6.59    4.16
Energy Intensity (BTU/$)    9,348      6,292      7,222      7,213      5,639      76,162      7,378
Oil Usage (b/$1000 GDP)        0.62    0.46    0.40    0.33    0.24    0.67    0.52

Note that GDP is Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).  Nominal GDP dollars based on current exchange rates for China, for example, is about $1.5  trillion.

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51 comments on Physics in the Economy I: Physical Work

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