17.6 Energy Security
17.6.2 Fuels
Under the GEA transition pathways, the vulnerabilities of globally traded fuels in the aggregate as well as of individual fuels decrease over time in terms of both sovereignty and resilience.
A proxy measure of the sovereignty aspects of energy security is global trade in energy. Absolute volumes of traded energy and the share of traded energy in overall energy use (the latter referred to here as “trade intensity”) indicate the extent to which regions rely on fuels produced in other regions, raising sovereignty concerns.
Figure 17.48 shows both trade volumes and trade intensity under the six GEA pathways considered here. The global aggregate energy trade vol-umes among the 11 GEA regions (estimated at some 104 EJ in 2005) peak in 2030 or 2040, and trade intensities peak in 2020 or 2030. Thereafter both indicators decline, so that by 2050 the intensity of trade is lower than at present but the absolute amount of trade remains higher than present values under the GEA-Supply scenarios. The decline in absolute trade volumes after 2030 is most pronounced in the Advanced Transport GEA-Mix and -Efficiency pathways and least pronounced in the high-demand, supply-dominated GEA transition pathways.
Concerning individual fuels, the analysis shows the following trends.
In all the GEA pathways considered, oil is phased out in the long term.
It accounts for between 9% and 15% of global primary energy sup-ply by 2050 and declines to less than 1% by the end of the century
(Table 17.22). As a result, trade volumes of oil for all pathways peak at about 100 EJ (compared with approximately 83 EJ today 54 ) between 2020 and 2030 and decline thereafter.
Present energy security concerns associated with oil drastically diminish in the GEA pathways because of their comparatively modest demand growth, which is due to efficiency improvements and a more diversified supply mix. No other fuel assumes a dominant role similar to that which oil plays today, accounting for 36% of primary energy supply world-wide. 55 Moreover, no “new oil” emerges in the global energy arena.
Table 17.22 summarizes the characteristics of the globally traded fuels in 2050 as compared with oil today. Figure 17.49 shows the shares of different fuels in global primary energy supply, indicating a more diver-sified supply portfolio. Figure 17.50 illustrates how trade volumes and the geographic concentration of production of oil, gas, and coal change across the GEA pathways. 56 Biofuels, hydrogen, and electricity are traded in much smaller volumes (a maximum of 50 EJ for hydrogen in the GEA-Supply pathway with Advanced Transportation) and with greater geo-graphic diversity of producers than is the case with oil today.
At the same time, by 2050 natural gas trade exhibits some of the characteristics of oil trade today under certain pathways. By 2050 gas accounts for about 20% of primary energy and 36–51 EJ of trade per year (compared with oil’s current 83 EJ). Additionally, gas production stays at its current level of geographic concentration until about 2050, which is comparable to the geographic concentration of oil production, and becomes even more concentrated than current oil production under most pathways thereafter, as shown by its decreasing Shannon-Wiener diversity index in Figure 17.50 . Although natural gas is a potentially more risky fuel, the overall resilience of energy systems, as measured
54 BP ( 2009 ) estimates a total volume of country-to-country oil trade of some 110 EJ in 2005. Thus, the GEA interregional model representation covers some 75% of actual oil trade fl ows at the country level.
55 Although electricity comes to dominate fi nal energy use, it is not, strictly speaking, a
“fuel,” as it is produced from a variety of sources. Moreover, global trade in electricity is minimal in all pathways, never accounting for more than 2% of total electricity supply.
56 The geographic concentration of production is measured by the Shannon-Wiener Diversity Index (SWDI), described below.
Table 17.21 | Indicators for analyzingenergy security across subsystems and security perspectives.
Global diversity of the primary energy system; dominance of a single fuel
Diversity of fuels used in the carrier or end-use sector
Regional Import dependency
(and export fl ows)
Diversity of primary energy supply in the region
Table 17.22 | Characteristics of globally traded fuels in 2050 compared with oil in 2005.
primary energy supply) 34 19–22 8–10 6–8
Trade volume (EJ/year) 83 35–54 10–20 7–14
Geographic concentration of production (diversity index) 1
1.0 0.9–1.0 1.3–1.4 1.2–1.5
1 See text for defi nition of the diversity index.
0 50 100 150
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Trade Volume (EJ)
0%
5%
10%
15%
20%
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100 Trade as proporon of primary energy supply
Adv. Trans. Conv. Trans.
Supply Pathways Mix Pathways Efficiency Pathways
Legend
Figure 17.48 | Volume of energy trade and trade intensity in the illustrative GEA pathways. Each of the transportation variants of the three GEA transition pathways is represented.
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Proporon of fuel in primary energy supply
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Proporon of fuel in primary energy supply
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Proporon of fuel in primary energy supply
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Proporon of fuel in primary energy supply
Adv. Trans. Conv. Trans.
Supply Pathways Mix Pathways Efficiency Pathways
Legend
Oil Gas
Biofuels Coal
Figure 17.49 | Contributions of fossil fuels and biofuels to global primary energy supply in the GEA pathways (unrestricted portfolios for advanced and conventional transport).
0 20 40 60 80 100
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Voulme of Trade (EJ)
0 20 40 60 80 100
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Voulme of Trade (EJ)
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100 Shannon-Wiener Index of Geographical Div. of Prod.
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100 Shannon-Wiener Index of Geographical Div. of Prod.
Adv. Trans. Conv. Trans.
Supply Pathways Mix Pathways Efficiency Pathways
Legend
Oil
Gas
Coal
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Voulme of Trade (EJ)
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0
2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100 Shannon-Wiener Index of Geographical Div. of Prod.
Volume of Oil Trade (2005)
Volume of Oil Trade (2005)
Diversity of Oil Producon (2005)
Diversity of Oil Producon (2005)
Volume of Trade
Geographic Diversity of Producers
Figure 17.50 | Volume of trade and geographic diversity of production of globally traded fuels in the GEA pathways (unrestricted portfolios for advanced and conventional transport).
by the diversity of primary energy supply, increases under all transition pathways.
The Shannon-Wiener diversity index (SWDI; see Shannon and Weaver, 1963 ) is frequently applied as a measure of energy security of supply (see, e.g., Jansen et al., 2004 ; APERC, 2007) and electricity generation (Stirling, 1994 ). The index is calculated as follows:
SWDI = – ∑(pi∗ ln(pi))
i