ENERGY SUPPLIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 June 1938, Page 10

ENERGY SUPPLIES

y-ORLD’S CHIEF SOURCES.

GENEVA, April.

The popular belief that waterpower is fast supplanting coal as the world’s chief source of energy supply is completely discredited by International Labour Office statistics compiled for the World Coal Conference. The statistics show that while, in 1935, coal and lignite supplied only 60.3 per cent of the world's energy requirements, as compared with 74.1 per cent in 1913, the percentage supplied by water power was only 6.6, as compared with 2.4 in 1913. Oil was coal’s chief competitor. It supplied 165 per cent of the world's energy output in 1935, as compared with 4.5 in 1913. Next came firewood, with 12.8 per cent in 1935 as compared with 17.6 per cent in 1913; then, natural gas, with 3.8 in 1935, as compared with 1.4 in 1913.

Thus, in 1935, coal and lignite provided three times as much energy as oil and natural gas together; nearly five times as much as firewood; and nearly ten times as much as waterpower.

The statistics show that, in 1936, coal contributed somewhat less than threefifths of the total supply of energy available for consumption in the United States. Bituminous coal alone was responsible for nearly half of the total; anthracite for from 6 to 7 per

cent. There, as in the world at large, coal has been losing ground relatively to other sources of power supply. While, at the turn of the century, it was yielding nine-tenths of the nation’s energy supply, in 1913 it yielded only four-fifths, and in 1936 less than threefit’ths.

In Germany and Great Britain, on the contrary, coal still provides ninetenths or more of the national energy requirements. In 1934, 88.8 per cent of Germany’s and 93.9 per cent of Great Britain’s consumption of energy were derived from raw and processed coal. The trend to oil and water power in both these countries was much more moderate than in the United States. The Soviet Union, despite its richness in wood, peat, mineral oils and water-power, is one of the few countries where coal is coming to occupy a larger place in the national fuel economy, the statistics show. Coal today provides well over 70 per cent of the energy requirements of that country, as compared with 53 per cent in the pre-war days; and this rise has taken place to the accompaniment of a considerable expansion in the total energy supply.