Executive Summary

Uninterrupted provision of vital energy services (see Chapter 1, Section 1.2.2) – energy security – is a high priority of every nation. Energy security concerns are a key driving force of energy policy. These concerns relate to the robustness (sufficiency of resources, reliability of infrastructure, and stable and affordable prices); sovereignty (protection from potential threats from external agents); and resilience (the ability to withstand diverse disruptions) of energy systems. Our analysis of energy security issues in over 130 countries shows that the absolute majority of them are vulnerable from at least one of these three perspectives. For most industrial countries, energy insecurity means import dependency and aging infrastructure, while many emerging economies have additional vulnerabilities such as insufficient capacity, high energy intensity, and rapid demand growth. In many low-income countries, multiple vulnerabilities overlap, making them especially insecure.

Oil and its products lack easily available substitutes in the transport sector, where they provide at least 90% of energy in almost all countries. Furthermore, the global demand for transport fuels is steadily rising, especially rapidly in Asian emerging economies. Disruptions of oil supplies may thus result in catastrophic effects on such vital functions of modern states as food production, medical care, and internal security. At the same time, the global production capacity of conventional oil is widely perceived as limited. These factors result in rising and volatile prices of oil affecting all economies, especially low-income countries, almost all of which import over 80% of their oil supplies.

Executive Summary

Chapter 17 explores possible transformational pathways of the future global energy system with the overarching aim of assessing the technological feasibility as well as the economic implications of meeting a range of sustainability objectives simultaneously. As such, it aims at the integration across objectives, and thus goes beyond earlier assessments of the future energy system that have mostly focused on either specific topics or single objectives. Specifically, the chapter assesses technical measures, policies, and related costs and benefits for meeting the objectives that were identified in Chapters 2 to 6, including:

• providing almost universal access to affordable clean cooking and electricity for the poor;

• limiting air pollution and health damages from energy use;

• improving energy security throughout the world; and

• limiting climate change.

The assessment of future energy pathways in this chapter shows that it is technically possible to achieve improved energy access, air quality, and energy security simultaneously while avoiding dangerous climate change. In fact, a number of alternative combinations of resources, technologies, and policies are found capable of attaining these objectives. From a large ensemble of possible transformations, three distinct groups of pathways (GEA-Supply, GEA-Mix, and GEA-Efficiency) have been identified and analyzed. Within each group, one pathway has been selected as “illustrative” in order to represent alternative evolutions of the energy system toward sustainable development. The pathway groups, together with the illustrative cases, depict salient branching points for policy implementation and highlight different degrees of freedom and different routes to the sustainability objectives.