麻豆传媒

Countries are striving to deliver a new era of economic growth driven by technologies like AI while addressing energy security and climate change.

Over the next 25 years, around a third of the world鈥檚 population will embrace higher income lifestyles, such as buying their first cars or taking their first flights. The 2025 Energy Security Scenarios highlight that primary energy demand in 2050 could be nearly 25% higher than in 2024.

Historically, it has taken new technologies 15鈥�25 years to establish themselves in the energy system, then another 15鈥�25 years to reach system-wide adoption. Information technology adoptions are around twice as fast as new adoptions in the energy system. As a result, as technologies like AI begin to impact the energy system, we can expect increased disruptions.

• Oil demand is likely to grow by 3鈥�5 million barrels per day into the early 2030s, with a long but slow decline after that as petroleum remains an affordable and convenient fuel, particularly in transport, and an important feedstock for the petrochemical industry.
• Natural gas demand could grow by around 500 billion cubic metres per annum (bcma) reaching around 4,640 bcma in 2040, of which 20% is liquefied natural gas (LNG). Gas fuels heat and power generation and has an important role in helping the world move away from coal.

Upstream investment is currently around $600 billion a year. This will be required for decades to come as the rate of depletion of oil and gas fields is two to three times the potential future annual declines in demand.

Construction of the energy system is shifting from large bespoke projects built in the field to modular units produced on assembly lines, for example solar photovoltaic modules and grid batteries.

• Solar photovoltaic, wind turbines and batteries come to dominate electricity generation.
• Nuclear could grow in the long term, with the help of new technologies.
• Electrification increases in many sectors, for example through the growth of electric vehicles.

• Biofuel production could triple by 2050, particularly if advanced conversion technologies progress.
• Hydrogen produced from water using renewable electricity or from natural gas with CCS will also grow, but only for uses where electrification is not an option.
• CCS could be a billion-tonne-a-year industry by 2050.
• Natural and engineered carbon removal will be crucial in the second half of the century.

Momentum in low-carbon technologies is already slowing growth in emissions. Following current trends, new technologies could halve the carbon intensity (kg CO₂ per unit of energy) of the energy system by 2050. However, to reach net-zero CO₂ emissions by 2050, progress will have to accelerate considerably.

Plausible scenarios indicate a near-term overshoot of the 1.5掳C goal, indeed temperature measurements have already confirmed that 2024 is the first individual year to breach 1.5掳C. By focusing on carbon removal technologies and practices, the world could achieve less than ~2掳C of warming by the end of the century.