Americans are notorious for using a lot of energy, even compared to people in other rich countries. Over the last two centuries our energy consumption has increased enormously:
What seems to be less well known is that most of that breathtaking rise in U.S. energy consumption was merely due to population growth. If we plot the same data on a per-capita basis, it looks like this:
According to this data, the 200-fold increase in energy use between 1800 and 2000 breaks down into a roughly 50-fold increase in population, combined with just a four-fold increase in energy use per capita. Considering that we didn’t have electricity, cars, or even trains in 1800, I find it astonishing that we used so much energy even then.
Of course the early data in these charts isn’t as reliable as the more recent data. Everything before 1949 comes from Table D1 of the Energy Information Administration’s Monthly Energy Review, which in turn cites a 1960 treatise for data between 1850 and 1945, and cites a 1942 Department of Agriculture study for data before 1850. These early studies were careful, but they were incomplete. They omit the energy content of feed for draft animals, as well as wind energy that propelled sailing ships and water energy that powered mechanical water wheels. The pre-1850 data is for fuel wood only, even omitting coal.
But there’s good news! We now have better data, from a new study by Suits, Matteson, and Moyer (2020). These authors have carefully estimated all the forms of energy I’ve just listed, all the way back to 1800. Here is how their bottom-line results compare to the EIA data for the period from 1800 through 1920:
According to Suits et al., Americans’ energy consumption during the early 1800s was higher than the EIA/DOA numbers by about a third. About half of the difference comes from including feed for draft animals, with smaller additions from including coal, wind, and water, and from revisions to fuel wood estimates.
[Technical comment on wind and water: There’s no single correct way to compare these mechanical forms of energy to fuels that we burn (or feed to animals). Suits et al. quantify wind and water energy by the amount of frictional heating that the motion (of a sailing ship or water wheel) can produce; the dashed blue line in the chart above adheres to this methodology. EIA, on the other hand, counts non-thermal sources of electrical energy according to the amount of fossil fuel that would be needed, in power plants of average efficiency, to generate the same amount of electrical energy. Even today, that average efficiency is less than 40%, while in 1920 it was only around 10%. The solid blue line in the chart shows the result of applying this 10% efficiency factor to wind and water throughout the time period shown—that is, multiplying the wind and water numbers by 10 to give what I consider a fairer comparison to biomass and coal that fueled inefficient engines. This factor of 10 is probably too low, because engines before 1920 were even less efficient than in 1920. In any case, as you can see, this ambiguity doesn’t have a huge effect on the results (because wind and water were never a huge fraction of total energy use).]
The Suits et al. data strengthen the point I made above: Although U.S. population and energy consumption grew enormously from the early 1800s to the late 1900s, per-capita energy consumption grew by only about a factor of 3. Our standard of living has improved considerably as a result of using more energy per person, but vastly more because we now use that energy so much more effectively.
Whichever data set we use, the big picture is the same: 19th century Americans used enormous quantities of fuel wood. They could do that because wood was abundant and free for the taking, after measles, smallpox, and genocidal warfare had so thoroughly depopulated the continent. Most of the wood was burned to heat homes in the winter, using inefficient open-hearth fireplaces before the widespread adoption of more efficient stoves.
For a detailed look at how Americans have used energy since 1800, I highly recommend the Suits et al. paper, as well as its supplement and the accompanying web site. I especially appreciate how both the paper and the web site illuminate the data with the insights of a professional historian. For even more insights, see this write-up in The Atlantic.
For improved versions of the first two charts above, using the Suits et al. data instead of EIA for the earlier years, I've created this interactive chart.
And how has U.S. energy consumption compared to other parts of the world? There is a wealth of recent statistics at Our World in Data, but numbers from before 1965 are harder to come by. The most complete data set I know of that goes back to the 19th century is the one compiled by Paulo Malanima, which begins in 1820. Here is a plot of Malanima’s data comparing per-capita energy use in North America (defined as the U.S. and Canada only), western Europe, and the world as a whole:
Today, North Americans use about twice as much energy each as western Europeans, and nearly four times as much as the world average. But in the early 1800s we were even more of an outlier, using about five times as much as western Europeans and seven times the world average. North Americans have a very long history of high energy use, but the energy gap between us and the rest of the world has been gradually closing. I suspect it will close further during the coming decades, as we find ways to be more efficient while the standard of living in poorer countries continues to improve.
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