Environment & Energy | Thursday 11 June, 2015 1:28 am |

The growth in global demand for energy slowed to levels not seen since the late 1990s, a new report suggests.
BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy said global energy consumption “slowed sharply” to an increase of just 0.9 percent in 2014.

BP said slow growth for energy demand was largely due to China’s economy moving away from “energy-intensive sectors.”
Separately, it said increased US shale supply was a “continuing revolution.”
The BP review also said the mixture of fuels which the world was using was changing.

BP’s CEO Bob Dudley said 2014 was characterized by “volatility and uncertainty” and “may well come to be viewed as symptomatic of a broader shifting in some of the tectonic plates that make up the energy landscape.”
Renewable power was the fastest growing form of energy last year, with a record 6 percent of global power generation, in a year when energy consumption slowed sharply worldwide, BP said in its authoritative review.
“Renewable energy used in power generation grew by 12 percent (last year),” said the report.

“Although this increase was below its 10-year average, it meant that renewables accounted for a record 6 percent of global power generation.”
China recorded the largest increase in renewables for power generation for a fifth consecutive year at 15.1 percent.
“The deceleration in global energy demand and shift in the fuel mix had a marked impact on carbon emissions,” BP said in the report.
“Our calculations suggest that global CO2 emissions from energy use grew by just 0.5 percent in 2014, the weakest since 1998, other than in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis,” it added.