The energetic metabolism of the EU-15 and the USA. Decadal energy input time- series with an emphasis on biomass

This paper presents an assessment of energy inputs of the European Union (15 countries before the 2004 enlargement, abbreviated EU-15) for the period 1970-2001 and the USA for 1980-2000. The data are based on an Energy Flow Analysis (EFA) that evaluates socio-economic energy flows in a way that is conceptually consistent with current Materials Flow Analysis (MFA) methods. EFA allows to assess the total amount of energy required by a national economy, it yields measures of the size of economic systems in biophysical units. In contrast to conventional energy balances which only include technically used energy, EFA also accounts for socio-economic inputs of biomass; that is, it also considers food, feed, wood and other materials of biological origin. This is relevant for comparisons across modes of subsistence (e.g., agrarian and industrial society) and also to detect interrelations between energy utilization and land use. In the EU-15 domestic energy consumption (DEC = apparent consumption = domestic extraction plus import minus export) grew from 60 Exajoules per year (1 EJ = 10 J) in 1970 to 79 EJ/yr in 2001, thus exceeding its territory’s net primary production (NPP, a measure of the energy throughput of ecosystems). In the USA, DEC increased from 102 EJ/yr in 1980 to 125 EJ/yr in 2000 and was thus slightly smaller than its NPP. Taken together, the EU-15 and the USA accounted for about 38% of global technical energy use, 31% of humanity’s energetic metabolism, but only 10% of global terrestrial NPP and 11% of world population in the early 1990s. Per-capita DEC of the USA is more than twice that of the EU-15. Calculated according to EFA methods, energy input in the EU and the USA was between one fifth and one third above the corresponding value reported in conventional energy balances. Biomass DEC per capita in 2000 was 50 GJ/cap/yr in the EU-15 and 88 GJ/cap/yr in the USA. The paper discusses implications of these results for sustainability as well as future research needs.

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