In the Face of War and Pestilence, Clean Energy Keeps Growing

Placeholder while article actions loadCovid-19’s remission wasn’t great for the energy transition. That’s the headline from BP Plc’s latest Statistical Review of World Energy.But 2021 was kind of a Newtonian year: an equal but opposite reaction to 2020’s pandemic-induced plunge. And not completely equal either. Although global oil demand rebounded by 5.5 million barrels a day, it remained below its pre-pandemic level. The International Energy Agency doesn’t expect demand to surpass 2019 until 2023. Coal consumption, for its part, jumped past 2019’s total, though didn’t quite reach its all-time peak of 2014. Only natural gas comfortably hit a new record. Still, fossil fuels rule the world, supplying 82% of primary energy demand.What they don’t rule, once you strip out the distortion of the plunge and snapback of the past two years, is growth.Notice how, in that…

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