China's Energy and Emissions Trends
China is the world’s largest consumer and producer of primary energy as well as the world’s largest emitter of energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2). China surpassed the U.S. in primary energy consumption in 2010 and in CO2 emissions in 2006. In 2018, China was responsible for 21% of total global primary energy use (IEA, 2019a) and about 29% of global energy-related CO2 emissions (IEA, 2019b).
China’s 1.4 billion people consume energy to meet their daily needs, including heating and cooling of their living and working places, fuel for cooking their meals, electricity to power their appliances and equipment, and fuels for both their own personal transportation as well as the products they purchase.
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Chapter 1 | China's Current Energy and Emissions Trends
Chapter 1 presents the most recent data available on China’s Current Energy and Emissions Trends, covering energy consumption, energy production, and energy-related CO2 emissions. Berkeley Lab’s China Energy Group has published the China Energy Databook, a fully relational database of national and provincial energy balances, plus detailed sectoral energy end-use tables developed in Microsoft Access containing over 120,000 data points, since 1992. Berkeley Lab’s China Energy Group has also published an accompanying Key China Energy Statistics booklet with selected figures and tables from the Databook that summarizes key energy data.
Chapter 2 | China's Key Targets, Policies, and Programs
Chapter 2 presents the most recent information available on China’s Key Energy Targets, Policies, and Programs, covering China’s energy and energy-related emissions commitments in the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), the Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement, and other documents as well as providing an update on 42 policies and programs currently in place in China focused on energy and related emissions. This chapter builds on the China Energy Group’s 30+ years of policy and program development, implementation, and analysis in China and is augmented by information provided through 18 interviews with research staff and policymakers in China.
Chapter 3 | China's Future Energy Outlook
Chapter 3 presents a Continuous Improvement Scenario of China’s Future Energy Outlook to 2050, modeling what China can achieve in terms of energy use and energy-related CO2 emissions with adoption of the maximum shares of commercially available, cost-effective energy efficiency and renewable energy supply by 2050. This scenario is built using the China Energy Group’s China 2050 Demand Resources Energy Analysis Model (DREAM) which was developed in collaboration with many international and Chinese researchers over the past 15 years.
Suggested Citation: Zhou, N., Lu, H., Khanna, N., Liu, X., Fridley, D., Price, L., Shen, B., Feng, W., Lin, J., Szum, C., Ding, C., 2020. China Energy Outlook: Understanding China’s Energy and Emissions Trends. Berkeley, CA: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.