Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
11.3 Energy Challenges and Problems in China
Having analyzed China's international energy status from a macro perspective,
this section will evaluate China's energy issues from its national and the micro
points of view. Among the challenges faced by China are extreme shortage of en-
ergy, poor energy production and consumption structure, inefficient energy con-
sumption, low energy technology, tremendous need for energy supply for rural ar-
eas, severe energy-related pollution and so on.
11.3.1 Three big challenges
For a deeper discussion, this section focuses on investigating three key energy
challenges, i.e. extreme shortage of energy, severe energy-related pollution and
tremendous energy supply for rural area.
a) Extremely Insufficient Energy Production
China's Energy Consumption Elasticity Coefficient (ECEC)
1
has decreased from
13.5 in 1985 to 0.66 in 2007, but it still reflects the fast consumption growth rate.
What is ECE? With continuous population increase and economic growth, huge
energy demand will give greater pressure on energy supply.
Table 11.3
displays
how large the average daily energy consumption of China in the recent four years
has been. Energy supply and demand has already gone above the present esti-
mated energy amount.
Figure 11.4
shows a comparison of total energy production
and consumption from 1978 to 2007. From the figure, it can be seen that the total
energy consumption has surpassed the total energy production since 1991, and the
differences seem to be becoming larger. In the past two decades, international Re-
serve-to-Production (R/P) ratios of oil and natural gas remain around 40 and 60
(Jiang 2007). Compared to the world average, China R/P ratios of oil is low at
only 11.1 in 2006. Currently, China's shortage of liquid fuels is much more seri-
ous, and the dependence on imported oil was already 57.7% in 2007. With further
increases in economic and population growth, China will import more oil from
other countries. Facing continuing increasing international oil price, what should
China do?
Energy supply per capita is also an indictor reflecting energy insufficiency. Ac-
cording to China Energy Statistics (DITSSSB and EBNDRC 2007), in 2005
China's energy supply per capita was 1.32 toe, which is lower than the 1.78 toe of
the world and far lower than 7.89 toe of United states. Another indicator is energy
supply in relation to GDP, which reflects the average energy supplied to produce
one unit GDP. China's energy requirement per unit of GDP has increased from
0.86 toe per thousand (2000 US$) in 2002 to 0.91 toe per thousand (2000 US$).
1
Energy Consumption Elasticity Coefficient (ECEC) is used to reflect the relations be-
tween economic growth and energy consumption, and the calculation expression is:
ECEC= annual energy consumption growth rate/ annual economic growth rate.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search