United States and world energy outlook for the 1980s

An assessment of energy supply and demand for the United States and the world to the year 1990 is presented as balanced volumetric energy flows disaggregated over the primary sources and major consuming sectors. On the national scene, some of the projections and conclusions are (1) between now and 1990 the world demand for oil will grow more rapidly than United States demand; (2) most of the energy to be consumed in the United States over the projection period will be supplied as domestically produced fossil fuels; (3) oil imports will increase to about 10 million BOPD throughout the decade of the 1980s, coming more and more from OPEC; (4) coal will supply an increasingly greater fraction of total U.S. energy consumption, primarily in the utility and industrial sectors; (5) new sources of energy will be developed, but before 1990 will have only a small impact on total supply; (6) nuclear power, while growing less vigorously than estimated in past projections, will be important to the nation's economy; and (7) the successful balancing of long-term U.S. energy futures is contingent on our ability to achieve significant reductions in energy consumption growth rates. On the international scene, it appears that: (1) unemployment may be the largest single factor affecting the international economy, (2) the majority of the oil reserves are in communist countries and the Middle East, (3) over 60% of the gas reserves are in communist countries, (4) and the same is generally true for coal reserves, (5) the United States will have to compete with the rest of the world for the available interregionally traded oil, and can only obtain that oil at the expense of other countries.