BELGIUM

1. ENERGY, ECONOMIC AND ELECTRICITY INFORMATION

1.1 General Overview

Belgium is a country of 30,514 square kilometres with 10.3 million inhabitants (2002). It has a high population density of 337 persons per square kilometre (over 95 per cent of the population is classified as urban) and high electricity consumption per capita. Belgium's natural population increase during the 1980s was only about 0.1%. By the end of the decade the birth rate increased so that the population grew from 9.98 million in 1991 to the present 10.3 million (Table 1).

Belgium is situated in the heart of Western Europe, bounded on the north by the Netherlands and the North Sea, on the east by Germany and Luxembourg and on the south and southwest by France. The climate is temperate. The country has no gas, no uranium, or no oil and very limited hydraulic resources. The mining of coal ended in 1978 in the south of the country and in the early 1990s in the north. Coal mining was no longer economically viable.

TABLE 1. POPULATION INFORMATION

Source: IAEA Energy and Economic Database.

The historical Gross Domestic Product (GDP) statistics are shown in Table 2.

TABLE 2. GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (GDP)

Source: IAEA Energy and Economic Database.

The country has no gas, no uranium, no oil and very limited hydraulic resources. The mining of coal ended in 1978 in the south of the country and in the early 1990s in the north. Coal mining was no longer economically viable. (proven reserves of bituminous coal in 1993 were 715 million Mt., see Table 3). Hydraulic resources are estimated to be 2,873 TJ. In the early 1980s, nuclear power replaced coal as the main indigenous energy source.

In 2001, the total primary energy consumed in Belgium amounted to 58,270 ktons of oil equivalent (2.4 EJ). Nuclear power provided 20.7% of this total compared with only 7% in 1980. Over the same period (1980-2001), the share of oil declined from 50% to 41.0%, while coal fell from 25% to 13.2%. Gas increased during the same period from 20% to 22.7%. 0.9% of the total primary energy consumed in Belgium in 2001 was produced from renewable energy sources. Missing 1.4% relates mainly to import/export differences (Table 4).

In 2001, per capita gross primary energy consumption in Belgium was 5.66 toe, or 237 GJ.

TABLE 3. ESTIMATED ENERGY RESERVES

Source: IAEA Energy and Economic Database.

TABLE 4. ENERGY STATISTICS(*)