Research On System Construction And Assessment For Energy Security

Energy is the basic support for a nation’s economy, and its security has become the key issue of national resource security and strategy attracting the attention of government and academia. In 2013, China’s consumption for energy was 22.4% in the world’s consumption. As one of energy superpowers in the world, China has been a hot topic in the field of energy. According to BP world energy statistics, China’s fossil energy consumption accounted for 86.7% in its energy structure in 2013, and to some extent the performance of fossil energy security reflects the performance of energy security. Therefore, it has a significant meaning and representation of analyzing and researching the current situation of China’s fossil energy security.The concept of energy security has been gaining attention from the government and the public, and energy security, with its importance also has attracted many attentions from the scholars. Early research for energy security mainly analyzed the availability and affordability, focusing on the exploration and development, and economic factors. With the economic globalization, accessibility also begins to catch the attention of scholars. More aspects, such as the environmental acceptability and state guarantees, are considered in recent studies. Although energy security issues has been discussed by many scholars, yet a lot of research work mainly focused on the concept, influence factors, evaluation system and strategy, and single method was adopted in the evaluation process. There has been limited research into system framework and integrated evaluation of energy security. Thus, there still has a certain research space in terms of system framework and evaluation for energy security, especially in the system construction and the choice of evaluation methods.Under this background, this dissertation intends to explore the following key scientific problems:how to represent China’s energy security system? What is the scientific evaluation method? How to measure China’s energy security performance? How to ensure China’s energy security?Based on this, this dissertation attempts to construct energy security system, and establish evaluation system. It evaluates the security performance of China’s petroleum, natural gas and coal for last 13 years with an integrated method model AGA-EAHP-EM-GRA-TOPSIS. The results are expected to draw the policy implications to offer direction and scientific reference to improve the performance of China’s energy security. This dissertation mainly research on the following five aspects: (1) It analyzes the situation and the main problems of China’s energy security from energy endowment, supply and demand, external dependency, and international environment of three important kinds of fossil energy. (2) Based on 4A conception, the process model of energy system and conceptual model of sustainable development, this dissertation puts forward Energy Security System 2AST to establish a theoretical framework for the evaluation of energy security. (3) It determines the key factors influencing the energy security from the resources endowment, supply and demand, and the ability level of guarantee. The corresponding evaluation indicators are selected to build an evaluation indicator system of energy security. (4) It studies and puts forward a set of integrated evaluation methods for evaluating energy security, and evaluates the security of three kinds of traditional fossil energy, petroleum, natural gas and coal. (5) Based on the energy security system and the results of integrated evaluation, the dissertation establishes the target, the emphasis and the guarantee system of energy security strategy.The specific structure of this dissertation is summarized as follows:The first chapter is the part of introduction. Based on the existing research background, this chapter expounds the theoretical and practical significance of this study. The research status of energy security is analyzed from four aspects:concept, influence factors, evaluation, and strategy and countermeasures. This chapter also determines the research goal, content, innovations and research methods of the dissertation, and then, the ideas and framework of the research are identified.The second chapter researches the problems of China’s energy security. It conducts a comprehensive analysis of the various internal and external factors that affect China’s energy security, and determines the advantages and disadvantages, opportunities and challenges for China’s energy security system under the background of globalization. The situation of three important kinds of fossil energy, petroleum, natural gas, and coal, are specifically analyzed. It also summarizes and expounds the problem of energy security in China.The third chapter constructs energy security system. It defines energy security from the resources, supply and demand security, economic security, ecological security and inter-generational security. Four subsystems are proposed to form Energy Security System "2AST":Availability, Accessibility, Sustainability and Technology Development. This chapter expounds the balanced, sustainable, global, intergenerational and dynamic characteristics of energy security system, and systematically analyzes the nature, function, system elements, and mechanism of energy security system, which establishes a theoretical framework for evaluating the performance of energy security.The fourth chapter designs evaluation system of energy security. It analyzes and determines the key factors influencing energy security from energy endowment, technology, economy, supply and demand at home and abroad, politics, transportation, and military, etc. According to the key extracted influence factors, and based on the existing research, the framework of evaluation system is built from four dimensions: Availability, Accessibility, Sustainability and Technology Development. It also presents the function, meaning, calculation formula, and types of each indicator. According to the data availability, it finally determines evaluation system of energy security including 19 indicators of four dimensions, which provides the basic framework for evaluating the performance of energy security.The fifth chapter builds evaluation model of energy security. By comparing the common evaluation method, and considering the characteristics of energy security, this chapter chooses five methods:Analytic Hierarchy Process, Accelerating Genetic Algorithm, Entropy Method, Grey Relational Analysis, and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution to build the integrated evaluation model of energy security AGA-EAHP-EM-GRA-TOPSIS, and provides the detailed algorithm and the main steps to solve the problem of energy security evaluation.The sixth chapter evaluates China’s energy security performance. This chapter demonstrates the application of AGA-EAHP-EM-GRA-TOPSIS model in energy security evaluation by taking three important traditional kinds of fossil energy as examples. Firstly,19 indicators’data of China’s petroleum, natural gas and coal are collected and standardized from 2001 to 2013. It obtains indicator weights by applying the methods of AGA, EAHP and EM, and comprehensively evaluates the security performance of petroleum, natural gas and coal, which aims to provide scientific methods guidance and application example for evaluating energy security.The seventh chapter researches on China’s strategy system of energy security. It analyzes the risk sources of energy security from four aspects:Availability, Accessibility, Sustainability and Technology Development. The strategic target and the safeguard priorities of developing new source, throttling, and protecting are confirmed from three aspects:supply, demand and national guarantee. It preliminarily establishes China’s energy security strategy through analyzing the strategy and experience from the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada and the former Soviet Union. Finally, according to the above research, it respectively proposes energy security countermeasures for petroleum, natural gas and coal from four aspects:Availability, Accessibility, Sustainability and Technology Development, which aims to provide valuable reference to improve China’s energy security.The eighth chapter concludes the research of this dissertation, and extracts the main achievements and the research conclusion. This chapter also illustrates the research limitation, and prospects the further research.Through the above research, this dissertation attempts to put forward a new architecture, scientific integrated evaluation methods, and a strategic concept in constructing energy security system, designing indicator system, improving method, making integrated evaluation, and building strategic system. It aims to enrich and expand the theory research on energy security. It also provides scientific decision support for the government to timely track and master the dynamic change of energy security to ensure China’s energy security. This research aims to achieve the following innovations:Innovation 1:Based on the existing "4A", this dissertation constructs Energy Security System "2AST", and analyzes its nature, function, system elements and operation mechanism,Innovation 2:Based on the methods of Analytic Hierarchy Process of Extended-value Scale (EAHP), Accelerating Genetic Algorithm (AGA), Entropy Method (EM), Grey Relational Analysis (GRA), and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), the integrated evaluation model is built to evaluate the level and performance of China’s energy security, which provides a guidance to evaluate energy security for our country from scientific methods.