PrintIn 2024, the world wide energy consumption was about 186,000 TWhs (or 635 Quadrillion BTUs). The energy mix used by the whole world is shown below in the figure from Our World in Data. This figure is interactive, so you can slide the bar across and see how that information changes over time. The largest energy source for the whole world is Oil, followed by Natural Gas and Coal. This means most of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels. If you slide the bar around, you can see how renewable has begun to steadily increase in the past decade or more.
Energy consumption numbers are always reported a few years behind, so we are always looking into the past before we plan for the future. As of 2024, The world's total primary energy consumption was about 186,000 TWhs (635 Quadrillion Btus).
The figure below shows how energy use is used per person (or per capita). You can see which countries have the highest energy use per person, in the dark red. The US is one of the highest consumers (but not the highest). Which country do you think is the highest user of energy per capita?
You can also explore this data, to see how it has changed over time. One major change over time is with China, which starts the time-laspe as about 1,000 kWh/ per person and ends the time-lapse at over 30,000kWh/per person.
- Do you expect this number to steadily increase?
- What do you expect to happen to India in the next 10 years?
- Do you think US energy use has increased, decreased or stayed the same over time?
Please click on the "Explore the data" for more analysis of each country over time.
The productivity of a country is measured by the total value (dollars) of goods and services, called Gross Domestic Product (GDP), produced by its people. Therefore, the average value of goods and services produced by each person - the GDP per capita of a country - is an indicator of the quality of life. The chart below shows the relationship between GDP and energy use per capita. While there are some outliers, the trend tends to have an upwards diagnonal shift. Click on the explore the data and you can filter the data by income group or country.
- What do you notice about the countries in the upper right corner of the chart?
- What do you notice about the countries in the lower left corner?
- Do you notice any similarities between the countires (Qatar, Brunei, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman) at the very top of the chart? Where are they located?
Global Energy Consumption and GDP per person
In general, as the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per person of any country increases, the amount of energy that is consumed is also expected to increase.
- For high income countries, the correlation is much stronger.
- For low income countries, the correlation is weak.
For example, Iceland, Denmark and the United States all have with similar GDP per capita. However, they each have significant differences in energy consumption per capita. In other words, to produce one dollar's worth of goods and services, the U.S. uses twice the energy of the Denamrk. Similarly, Iceland uses five times the energy of the Denmark.
Energy Consumption Differences
The differences in energy consumption among countries are the result of:
- efficiency of industrial, transportation, commercial, and residential energy,
- climatic and geographical areas of a country,
- lifestyles (use of more gas guzzling cars and SUVs and bigger sized houses), and
- the nature of the products produced by the nation's industries.
Click here to see Global Average Change in Energy Production by Fuel and determine production of energy which energy sources decreased over the last 5 decades.