Oil Consumption for Transportation and Other Uses in Industrialized and Developing Nations, 1990-2020

Source: EIA, International Energy Outlook 2000

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• The transportation sector is the primary user of petroleum, consuming 49 percent of the oil used in the world in 1997. The patterns of consumption between the industrialized and developing countries are quite different, however. In the heat and power segments of the markets in industrialized countries, nonpetroleum energy sources were able to compete with and substitute for oil throughout the 1980s; and by 1990, oil consumption in other sectors was less than in the transportation sector.

• Most of the gains in worldwide oil use occur in the transportation sector. Of the total increase (11.4 million barrels per day) projected for the industrialized countries from 1997 to 2020, 10.7 million barrels per day are attributed to the transportation sector, where few alternatives are economical until late in the forecast.

• In the developing countries, the transportation sector also shows the fastest projected growth in petroleum consumption, rising nearly to the level of nontransportation energy use by 2020. In the developing world, however, in contrast to the industrialized countries, oil use for purposes other than transportation is projected to contribute 42 percent of the total increase in petroleum consumption. The growth in nontransportation petroleum consumption in the developing countries is caused in part by the substitution of petroleum products for noncommercial fuels (such as wood burning for home heating and cooking) as incomes rise and the energy infrastructure matures.