Research on energy saving potential and countermeasures in China’s transport sector

Abstract

As the people’s living condition improves, the energy demand in China’s transport sector has grown dramatically and will keep increasing in the short term. In this research, we adopted a bottom-up approach to conduct the energy conservation analysis in China’s transport sector during the 14th Five-Year Plan Period based on the LEAP model. This study aims to estimate the energy saving potential of the transport sector in China under three scenarios: the Business as Usual (BAU) scenario, the Energy Conservation (EC) scenario, and the Enhanced Energy Conservation (ECC) scenario. The results indicated that the total energy demand in China’s transport sector would continue to grow over the 14th Five-Year Plan Period, and it would come up to 665.29 million tons of coal equivalent (Mtce) by 2025 in the BAU scenario. The EC scenario and the EEC scenario would save 27.80 and 40.99 Mtce by 2025 compared to the total energy demand in the BAU scenario. Besides, the energy demand of freight transport, intercity passenger transport and urban passenger transport would reach 250.45, 60.75 and 353.89 Mtce by 2025 in the BAU scenario. The corresponding energy saving potential of freight transport, intercity passenger transport and urban passenger transport would be 20.45, 2.22 and 5.12 Mtce by 2025 in the EC scenario, and would be 27.64, 3.34 and 10.01 Mtce by 2025 in the EEC scenario. Considering the significant energy saving potential of the transport sector in China, several major tasks and policy recommendations were then proposed to further reduce the transportation energy consumption.

Keywords

• Transport sector
• Energy conservation
• LEAP model
• Scenario analysis
• China