Understanding our energy future
Our energy forecasting team have developed three key energy scenarios (Balance, Emergence and Renaissance) to illustrate possible futures.
Balance scenario:
Balance provides an outlook of the energy system up to 2035 based on current policies and trends.
Sustained growth of China and other emerging countries is a powerful driver of global energy demand, but confirmed energy policy commitments in several regions play a key role in controlling the pace of growth.
However, non-coordinated policies result in soaring CO2 emissions across the world and energy prices rise.
Emergence scenario:
This scenario explores the implications of more stringent climate policies, with more ambitious efforts on energy efficiency, initiatives to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and a real emergence of renewable technologies.
Europe goes beyond its -20% targets by 2020, and the OECD and emerging countries meet their Copenhagen objectives. Following this, a new green deal is launched to reduce world emissions by a factor of 2 by 2050.
Renaissance scenario:
With strong efforts in the exploitation and production of unconventional oil and gas resources, the world encounters a fossil fuels renaissance with the appearance of new key actors and ultimately new geopolitical configurations changing the energy independence of several countries.
For climate efforts, this new paradigm leads to progressively weaker policies.
Further analysis and key findings are available here:
- Increasing economic activity and wealth drives energy consumption, in a balance between energy prices and innovation
- As Non-OECD exceeds OECD oil demand, massive financial flows underlie the shifts in global oil trade
- Optimistic resource assumptions and moderate production costs would lead to an oil production Renaissance
- EU gas demand will increase but its attractiveness is eventually reduced with ambitious climate policies
- Optimistic shale gas development will boost gas supply, with gas independence only reached in a few regions
- Non-OECD emission reduction efforts will catch up those in advanced economies by 2020 then exceed them
- Coordinated climate policies will substantially decrease the coal share in the power sector, even with CCS
- With already planned activity on renewables, the EU is on a good track to meet the 2020 objective of 20%, and by 2030 as much as 40% of gross final consumption could come from renewable sources
- For 2020 and beyond, the EU’s emissions objectives are mainly reached via renewables deployment and energy efficiency