Transport Energy Modeling And Policy Assessment Within A Computable General Equilibrium Framework

Transport activities are the dominated consumer of"scarce"petroleum products, which cause problems in energy security, urban environmental pollution and GHGs emissions. The modelling of transport sector is already one critical part in the field of energy economics and climate change. The appearance and maturation of advanced vehicle technology and alternative fuels, and creative transport energy policy, provide the opportunity and uncertainty of transport sustainable development. In China, the transport is experiencing fast development and in transition. It is with realistic sig-nificance to assess the transport development and potential impact of policy.Based on the empirical result and theoretic analysis of transport evolution, the thesis developed the modal split model based on time and money budgets, which dif-ferentiate the urban & intercity transport and urban & rural people group and take account of the competition, saturation and"sum to 1"attributes of modes in one sys-tem, and improve the overlook or simplicity of structure in most current transport studies; By calibrating the I-O table using the energy balance table the thesis adopted the price model of input-output analysis to build the hybrid I-O table for CGE model-ling. These are two creative points of this study.By comparing the function of CGE model and technology model and their strength and weakness applied in the study of transport sector, the model framework is constructed with the coupling among IPAC-SGM2002, modal split model and IPAC-AIM/Enduse, which can assess the interaction of economy, transport and en-ergy. The thesis studied the transport development and its impact in 30 years with 2002 as base year, and simulated the three factors, i.e. transport volume, modal evolu-tion and vehicle technology selection. By constructing three progressive scenarios, including baseline, fuel tax and decoupling, focusing the topic"whether the decoup-ling between transport, transport energy consumption and economic growth can be achieved", the thesis assessed the response to policy of these three factors and result-ing transport energy consumption. The thesis quantitively assessed the influence of fuel tax and its time implication; discussed the policy portfolio of decoupling and its feasibility.The main conclusions of this study include: (1) if current trend is kept, the transport energy demand will be in line with GDP still, which will be a huge chal-lenge to energy security and environmental protection; (2) 1.5 Yuan/Liter fuel tax can reduce the energy consumption obviously, which is 10% or so in 2030, and the fuel tax will be more cost-effective if it can be put into operation earlier; (3)the hybrid car will become competitive and earn a big share after 2015, and the diesel technology and biofuel mixture is still in a niche market status and the other advanced technolo-gies are still long-term choices; (4) The decoupling between transport and GDP is very difficult and need more technology progress achievements and stringent policies, but most of the policies are feasible and need to promote solidly in order to reduce the negative impact of transport development by the greatest extent.