The recently released BP Statistical Review provides an interesting snapshot of world energy use.

While it confirms the trend of an upswing in global oil inventories, it also highlights energy demand seeing a significant increase.

The BP figures, representing some of the most comprehensive industry data, show energy consumption is up by 2.5% year-on-year, lagging the real growth or global GDP, at 3.8%.

However, the highest consumption growth level among the energy sources came from coal, up 5.4% year-on-year, while nuclear energy demand fell 4.3%, largely due to the post-Fukushima freeze in nuclear power generation both in Japan and Germany.

Analysts say the BP data showing increase in coal consumption points to the dominance of the Asia-Pacific region as the epicentre of energy demand, while both the European Union and the US face sluggish economic growth.

The gains in Asia more than offset the coal demand destruction in North America due to the shale gas boom, where coal use went down by 5% year-on-year.

The Asia-Pacific region now accounts for around 39% of global energy consumption and 69% of global coal consumption.

Analysts point out that the increased use of coal in Asia and the opposite trend of coal use in North America and Asia also reflect the rather murky nature of natural gas markets in Asia and how the commodity is priced.

While natural gas prices are linked to the Henry Hub spot prices in the US, providing both a transparency and liquidity in the gas markets, Asian prices are rather opaque and largely indexed to the price of oil.

So while US spot prices are at record lows trading at $US2.30 per million British thermal units, the price of spot LNG into Japan has been quoted at around $18/MMBtu – a differential of 8 times.

“What is becoming clear is that the result of the inherent inefficiencies in gas pricing outside North America are limiting the market share gains of that commodity and are pushing users in high gas price regions to continue using coal,” Barclays Capital said in a research note.

The increased use of coal will result in locking the world into a much higher emissions path, analysts say.

Barclays estimated due to higher energy demand, global carbon dioxide emissions from primary energy use were up 2.9% year-on-year, adding 1 gigatonne of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

It is a trend which will surely have policy makers worried as the United Nations Rio+20 Summit gets underway and policies to combat climate change get a renewed push.