BAKU, Azerbaijan, Jan.12. Despite the rapid recent growth in clean energy technologies, the world still relies predominantly on fossil fuels for its energy supply, Trend reports with reference to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
“In fact, growth in clean energy supply since 2000 has been dwarfed by that of oil, gas and coal, especially in the emerging and developing economies. In those countries, the share of fossil fuels in total primary energy supply increased from 77 percent in 2000 to 80 percent in 2021, mainly due to a jump in coal, from 27 percent to 35 percent. In the advanced economies, the share dropped from 82 percent to 77 percent over the same period. As a result, the overall share of fossil energy in the global energy mix has remained almost constant at about 80 percent,” IEA says in its latest report.
The report reveals that oil remains the single largest source of primary energy, making up 29 percent of total energy supply in 2021 (down from 37 percent in 2000), followed by coal at 26 percent (up from 23 percent) and natural gas at 23 percent (up from 21 percent).
“Bioenergy is still the single largest source of non-fossil energy, accounting for around 10 percent of total primary energy use in 2021, though over one-third is in the form of traditional biomass, often used in unsustainable and polluting ways. Nuclear power makes up 5 percent of supply, hydropower around 2 percent, and solar and wind together a mere 2 percent. While electrification has accelerated over the last two decades, fossil fuels still dominate energy end use, accounting for around 35 percent of total energy use in buildings and 95 percent in transport,” says IEA.
The agency analysts note that in addition to the direct use of energy, end-use sectors consume large amounts of energy embedded in materials, such as cement for infrastructure and buildings, steel for vehicles and manufacturing goods, and chemicals for fertilisers and consumer goods.
“The production of these bulk materials today also relies mainly on fossil fuels, either for combustion or as feedstock. In 2021, coal made up around 75 percent of the energy used in global steel production and more than half of that used to make cement, while about 70 percent of chemicals production was based on oil or natural gas. The demand for so-called “critical minerals”,5 from which metals such as copper, nickel and cobalt are produced, has been increasing briskly in recent years, driven by the deployment of clean energy technologies such as batteries, yet their combined production by mass represents just 0.3 percent of that of coal today. The extraction and processing of critical minerals typically relies on fossil fuels at present.”
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