Elsevier

Applied Energy

Volume 143, 1 April 2015, Pages 359-369
Applied Energy

Mapping and benchmarking regional disparities in China’s energy supply, transformation, and end-use in 2010

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.01.011Get rights and content

Highlights

  • West-China and Central-China produced about 89% of the country’s coal in 2010.

  • About 50% of coal fired power generation and 90% of refining was located in East-China in 2010.

  • East-China’s industry sector consumed about 70% of oil; 58% of coal and 53% of electricity in 2010.

  • Inconsistencies between China’s national and provincial statistics in 2010 are huge, in particular for coal.

Abstract

China’s past economic development policies resulted in different energy infrastructure patterns across China. Regional disparities in China’s current energy flow are rarely visualised and quantified from a system-wide perspective. This study therefore constructs Sankey diagrams for three sub-regions of China in 2010, benchmarks those to the corresponding national Sankey diagram, and quantifies the following major regional disparities: (i) West- and Central-China account for about 89% of the country's coal production. (ii) About 50% of coal fired power generation and about 90% of refining can be mapped to East-China. (iii) East-China also dominated the country's industrial energy consumption, accounting for about 70% of oil, about 58% of coal and about 53% of electricity consumption in industry. This paper highlights the need to combine national and regional energy planning to account for this spatial heterogeneity in China’s energy infrastructure, such as future energy intensity and CO2 emission reduction targets. More comparable statistical research is needed to better understand inconsistencies between China’s provincial and national energy statistics, in particular for coal. We find data differences of up to 46% for coal, which are due to statistical inconsistencies and assumptions in our methodology.

Introduction

China is the world’s largest energy consumer and energy sector decisions in China have global implications [1]. China’s past economic development policies resulted in a large degree of regional disparity. China’s successful economic development policies, which were laid out in the 7th five year plan (1986–1990), targeted different regional patterns of industrialisation and production for East-, Central-, and West-China [2]. The coastal provinces of China have been in the focus of China’s economic development policies since many years, amongst others due to their favourable geographic location for international trade and foreign investments [3]. China’s past economic development policies resulted subsequently in different energy infrastructure investments across China. China’s current energy infrastructure is thus showing different regional characteristics in energy supply, transformation, and end-use, such as in the status of energy transmission/distribution systems and the location of major load centres.

Many China-focussed research areas are in the process of switching from national level to regional and provincial level analysis, in order to get a more detailed picture of China's regional disparities and provide better targeted policy recommendations. China-specific research at a sub-national level highlights large disparities between the highly developed coastal provinces and other provinces in the central and western regions of China. Regional disparities in China’s energy system are being analysed more frequently in recent years, as the following examples show: regional inequity in CO2 emissions and emission leakage within China is considerable and requires both national and regional oriented policy instruments [4]. About 57% of China’s emissions in 2007 were related to goods that are consumed outside of the province where they were produced [5]. Jiangsu province, one of the highly developed coastal provinces, relied in its energy supply in 2009 about 91% on energy imports from other Chinese provinces or foreign countries [13]. China’s provincial and national energy productivity and energy efficiency indicators in 2007 varied considerably across China and inter-provincial energy trade was high [1]. This suggests more targeted research on China's regional energy infrastructure disparities, also in view of sharing of best practises with other countries [1].

To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no regional energy flow analysis for China available, which calculates and visualises regional disparities in China’s energy system from a combined national and regional system perspective. Such an analysis would require accounting for all major fuels and energy carriers in energy supply, energy transformation, and end-use. Whilst national level energy flow charts for China are being used in many strategic studies for China’s future energy system [6], [7], [8], regional energy flow analysis for China was only recently suggested as a research priority by China’s National Energy Administration [9]. Furthermore few studies combine an energy system analysis for China with a detailed discussion of the underlying national and provincial statistical and data quality issues.

Application areas for this China-specific regional energy flow analysis presented here are thus targeting a broad and interdisciplinary audience. The results of this study could contribute to the following energy research areas:

  • (i)

    the analysis of regional disparities in China’s current energy system [10], [11], [12], [13], [14];

  • (ii)

    the development of national, regional and provincial policy instruments in the water–air-energy nexus, such as air quality policies and energy efficiency targets [1], [4], [15], [16], [17], [18];

  • (iii)

    the modelling of future economic, energy, and emission scenarios for different sub-regions in China [6], [7], [8], [19], [20], [21];

  • (iv)

    the communication of China-specific scientific results to a broad audience, including the visualisation of data issues in China’s national and provincial energy statistics [22], [23], [24], [25].

This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the theoretical framework of this research, the analysis of energy flows. This is applied in Section 3 to conduct a regional energy flow analysis for China. Section 4 presents the results of our calculations, describing energy flow charts for East-, Central- and West-China’s energy supply, transformation, and end use in 2010. The discussion of major regional energy system disparities in China takes place in Section 5, followed by a discussion of statistical and data quality issues in Section 6. The author’s conclusions for policy- and decision-makers are provided in Section 7. Appendix A provides the data tables behind the regional analysis whilst Appendix B provides the national energy flow analysis for easy comparison.

Section snippets

Theoretical framework: energy flow analysis

Energy flow analysis has a long history, dating back more than 100 years. The first Sankey diagram was developed by the Irish engineer R. Sankey in 1898 [26]. Energy flow diagrams, often also called Sankey diagrams, are nowadays a standard methodology to visualise and analyse complex systems in different application areas in science and in engineering. The system boundaries for energy flow analysis can be defined in a very flexible way, from a very small system size (such as a product, a

Defining system boundaries of East-, Central-, and West-China

China’s official statistics disaggregated the country since the 1980s frequently into three different regions or “belts”, namely “the East,” “the Centre” and “the West”. Over the past three decades, China’s regional modernisation and economic development policies have been focussed on the East, which subsequently leads to the current regional disparities in economic, energy and emission indicators within China. This paper uses the most recent official regional definitions of East-, Central- and

Results: regional energy flow analysis for China

This chapter presents the main characteristics of the three different regional energy flow charts for China. We follow the principle of an energy balance and highlight major aspects for energy supply, energy transformation and final energy use. For easy reference, we provide the underlying regional energy balance tables in Annex A and the national energy flow chart in Annex B.

Discussion: regional energy system disparities in China

This chapter builds on the newly developed regional energy flow charts for China. We highlight here major disparities between the three regional energy systems and the national energy system, provided in Appendix B. This analysis is carried out for all major energy flows (defined as larger than 250 million tsce). Data quality issues are addressed in the following Section 6.

Limitations: data quality

The discussion of data quality issues for China is important to understand the range of uncertainty in the underlying two sets of official NBS energy statistics and our applied methodology. We calculate data differences for major energy flows between national and aggregated regional energy indicators for China in both tsce and in%. A positive data difference means that the three regions combined are larger than the corresponding national energy indicator. On the other hand, a negative data

Conclusion and policy implications

This paper aims to raise policy attention and improve the understanding of China’s regional disparities in energy supply, transformation and end use. The future development of China’s energy infrastructure, interlinked with regional economic development planning, needs to account for various major regional disparities in the country’s energy system:

  • Supply side: West-China accounted for about 50% and Central-China for about 39% of the national coal production in 2010. The share of domestic

Acknowledgements

The work presented in this paper is mainly funded by the Sino-Danish Centre for Education and Research (www.sinodanishcenter.dk) and the Danish Idella Fonden under an ongoing Sino-Danish PhD project at the Technical University of Denmark, Energy System Analysis Division. We furthermore gratefully acknowledge the support of Tsinghua University, Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy, for software use and China-specific statistical discussions, from the following projects: (i) Shandong

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