no one can predict how quickly Europe, and in particular Germany, will succeed in freeing themselves from their dependence on Russian fossil fuels. But on this continent as on the others, all those who spoke of the transition to green energies now have good arguments for accelerate this transition.
But what kind of acceleration are we talking about? The website Carbon Trackerwhich offers different tools to track carbon reduction pledges, recently published a series of calculations on this subject. First of all, if we assume a growth in energy needs of 1% per year, and a growth of solar and wind power of 15% per year, then peak oil has already been reached, and the oil production will gradually begin to decline.
And this first estimate does not come from an ecological group, but from the oil company BP, in its annual report Statistical Review of World Energy2021 edition.
Except that was a pre-Ukraine forecast. The energy strategist of Carbon TrackerKingsmill Bond, therefore adds his own speculations: assuming that this oil shock causes an increase in energy efficiency of only 1%, and assuming that the solar-wind increase increases from 15 to 20% per year, the demand for fossil fuels will fall by 25% by 2030 and collapse in the following decade.
“As the largest exporter of fossil fuels, Russia sits on the fault line of this transition. »
Already, Europe has shown a desire to reduce its consumption of Russian fossil fuels this year, and to accelerate its transition to green energies. The International Energy Agency last month published a set of 10 recommendations ranging from the reduction of the speed limit on the motorways to teleworking, which would already allow substantial savings to be made.
If these calculations hold, any new oil exploration project, such as the Bay du Nord project off the coast of Newfoundland, announced last weektherefore runs the risk of arriving too late: considering the years that will pass before having put the infrastructures in place, before having carried out the drilling and before having extracted the first liters of oil, the world of energy could then turn out to be very different from that of today.
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