More data on energy in Vietnam

Hope everyone had a nice weekend. Mine was busy but good. Lots of cooking and hanging with friends.

I wanted to continue to show some of the data that I picked up from the BP report: Statistical Review of World Energy 2019. Today, I wanted to look at some of the sources of energy. This report had some interesting data on fossil fuels that I wanted to highlight. Also a little on hydro and renewables.

Oil: The interesting point here is that oil production exceeded consumption until just recently (at least post Doi Moi). In 2004, the country was producing almost 300,000 barrels daily above their consumption. That equates to $12m in 2004 dollars and more like $15m in today’s, or $4.4bn a year ($5.6bn in today’s dollars).

Reserves also continue to go up. I don’t know how much of these reserves are off-shore, but I would assume a lot. And those are harder to tap, not helped by the general South China Sea issues with China.

The growth rates are crazy:

Oil production: increased 13.3% annually since 1987 (starting from a very low base)
Oil consumption: 7.3% annually since 1987
Oil reserves: 18.7%

These seem pretty unsustainable to me, but then again, we aren’t seeing a big move away from oil-powered transportation in Vietnam.

Gas: Production and consumption of natural gas is growing even faster than oil usage. It is up 19.8% annually since 1987. The big jump came after 2003, when it increased from 2.3 to 9.1 billion cubic meters by 2010. Because Vietnam can’t export and only just started to import gas, it consumes all it produces. The current consumption/production is 9.6 billion cubic meters, equivalent to 57 million barrels a year, or 155,000 a day.

Both production and reserves have plateaued, and I don’t know why that is. It will be interesting to see if this changes if there is any change to the situation in the South China Sea. Also, the importing of LNG should be meaningful.

Coal: Production of coal has fallen, which is surprising. But no surprise on the consumption side: it’s rising, rising, rising. There are also very large reserves: 3.4bn tonnes. That equates to a R/P ratio (reserves to production) of 81. This means at current production levels it would take 81 years to finish off the reserves. In terms of oil equivalents, coal use is less than natural gas and less than oil, by far. But its use is rising.

Both the US and Australia are looking to expand coal exports to Vietnam. However, while there are a lot of coals coal plants planned, very few are actually under construction. Given that PPP (public-private partnerships) are such a big part of infrastructure funding, it might be difficult to find private partners willing to fund/build/operate coal plants in the current environment.

Hydro & renewables: Growing quickly, but it’s small. We have seen a start of renewables, and Vietnam has a long history with hydro. This is all and good, but it is still relatively small, unfortunately. To be clear, I am mostly talking about renewables here. Hydro makes up more than a third of electricity production. And it doubled from 2006 to 2018. Consumption equates to almost 20m barrels of oil, so it isn’t tiny. This compares to 34m of coal, 57m in gas and 361m in actual oil. So it makes up a real part of the mix.

Renewables, though, are tiny at less than a Terawatt-hours. It is just going to take time to change this. As a reminder, the country used over 210 TWhs a year in 2018. Optimistic reading: there is lots of room to grow!

Just a comment on the chart above: renewables are growing like crazy. They more than tripled from 2014 to 2018. And they didn’t even really start until 2015. But you can’t really see that in the chart, because they are such a tiny and insignificant portion of the mix. My chart demonstrates that. It would be very easy to do another one that just has a line going up and up to the right, and that would be true. But on the ground, renewables just aren’t a part of the mix yet.

Oil prices through history: Finally, I wanted to add this chart, that is just fascinating. It shows oil prices through history. Turns out that oil was actually extremely stable from about 1880 to 1970. That’s almost a century. Since then, it has been a mess. In the past fifty years, it has risen to over $120 and fell back to $20, all using 2018 dollars. It’s current price is high compared to the average over history of $37 and the average of $58 since 1970.

Weirdly, prices spiked during WWI, but not so during WWII. Not sure if this is representative of oil prices everywhere, especially back then.

Anyway, that was just a little tidbit I found interesting. Enjoy!

VietEcon

More data on energy in Vietnam

VietEcon