The big picture here is a familiar one. As Bob Dudley, the BP chief executive, points out, over the past 50 years the world's population has grown by more than in the entire previous hundred thousand years of human existence. Since 1970, it's doubled to around 7bn souls. At the same time, GDP has risen threefold and consumption of primary energy by around 2.5 times.  Up until 1990, the vast bulk of this energy consumption was in advanced OECD nations. In the past 20 years, that's changed dramatically. With emerging markets playing economic catchup, more than half the demand now comes from the developing world.  You get some very scary numbers indeed on energy demand if you merely extrapolate these underlying trends forward. We know that energy consumption is intimately linked to population and income growth, so it's easy to fall into this trap.  World population is expected to grow another third before it peaks (unlike the great bulk of forecasts, demographic prediction has a reasonably good track record), and of course, the developing world has an awfully long way to go before it reaches Western levels of per capita income and therefore energy consumption. The world lacks the capacity to meet demand on such a scale.  Fortunately, it won't work out that way, if only because it can't. If we were to carry on down that trajectory, the pessimistic camp of economists would be proved correct long before we reached the degree of population and output growth the developing world is planning for. It's therefore a logical impossibility.  Writing in The Times in 1894, one columnist estimated that such was the growth in horse-drawn carriages that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Some of today's extrapolations for energy usage look equally ridiculous. Nor do we have to rely on a technological breakthrough as significant as the internal combustion engine to save us from being buried in manure.  Here's why. Western experience is that energy "intensity", or use of energy for any given unit of output, grows very strongly during the industrialisation phase, but then peaks and goes into steep decline.  Globalisation of energy supply, in combination with now pretty much borderless technology transfer, means that the peak of intensity will be reached at a much earlier stage of the development trajectory in China and other emerging markets than we've seen in past industrialisations.  China's particular concerns over energy security make it doubly determined to avoid the old fallbacks of oil and gas in power generation. For China, renewable, nuclear and domestic coal will form a greater proportion of the energy mix than has been common in past industrialisations, thereby further easing the pressures of global demand on supplies of oil and gas.  Add all this up, and BP reckons that global demand for energy will grow by "only" 1.7pc a year up until 2030. This is obviously not a trivial number given that production from known oil reserves may already be peaking. Compounded up, it equates to energy demand some 40pc higher in 20 years' time than it is today.  That's a big ask for already stretched energy suppliers. But it is also much lower than the expected increase in output, and more importantly, there's no reason to believe it won't be manageable. New sources of energy are being discovered all the time – shale gas being a recent example. For some, thorium offers the next great frontier.  Demand for oil, BP reckons, will increase more slowly still, despite the enormous growth in car ownership expected in the developing world. The mitigating factor here is not so much electrification of the automobile fleet – unlikely to happen on a substantive scale until after 2030 – but further efficiency improvements in that old workhorse, the internal combustion engine.  In any case, far from collapsing under the weight of its own insatiable appetite for energy, the world looks more than able to cope, for now at least. High dependency on OPEC will, regrettably, remain a fact of life, but there's nothing new on that front.  The upshot is that the long-term inflationary pressures from energy, though not to be lightly dismissed, may not be as extreme as commonly assumed. It seems more than probable that oil will break back through the $100 a barrel mark in the coming months; the speed of recovery in the world economy has taken everyone by surprise. But there's nothing in the fundamentals to say that this is but a staging post on the road to $200, or even $300 oil.  And remember, a high price can have positive effects too, for it rations demand, creates innovation, and drives both efficiency and investment in new sources of supply. High prices don't have to be a harbinger of doom. By acting as a wake-up call, they can instead incentivise the solutions.  Energy & Utilities and Oil & Gas vacancies at Telegraph Jobs
As on most things, economists disagree &ndash; sometimes violently &ndash; on the question    of whether apparently ballooning global demand for energy can be met in an    economically sustainable way. There are many different schisms, but just two    over-arching tendencies.