PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
for his estimate, but if I were to use the energy-substitution picture and
the fact that world energy consumption has been growing at a steady
average of 2 percent annually since 1860, I would find a 220 percent
increase in natural gas consumption by 2010. In the United States
alone, the increase would certainly be bigger because energy consumption
here has been growing at least 3 percent annually. Doing the
analysis quantitatively for the United States the model projected that
for the year 2000 natural gas consumption should be four times that
of year 1982.
Ten Years Later
That turned out to be a most inaccurate forecast! The small
circles in Figure 7.6 show important deviations from the projected
trends for the shares of coal and natural gas. While the
trajectories for oil and nuclear energy consumption turned out
as predicted, the evolution of natural gas fell way below what
had been expected, and the share of coal remained high deviating
progressively more and more from the predicted course.
How can these energy sources behave like species in natural
competition for almost one hundred years, and then suddenly
fall in disarray?
Cesare Marchetti argues that the deviation is due to legislative
intervention by some governments (for example, U.K.
and Germany) to keep coal production levels high. Such interventions
can be considered “unnatural” and should be corrected
sooner or later. According to this thinking, pressure
must be building up for corrective action, which could take the
form of miners’ strike, social unrest, or other political intervention.
But there is another problem. The extraordinary
gains of coal depress the market share of natural gas instead
of that of oil. In the substitution model there can be no interaction
between phasing-in and phasing-out competitors;
everyone competes against the frontrunner, in this case oil,
and yet in Figure 7.6 natural gas, a phasing-in competitor,
loses market share to coal, a phasing-out competitor. Oil, the
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