Forecast Of Total Coal Demand Demand And Structural Change In China

As the main part of primary energy consumption in China, coal has remained around 67%-77% in the total energy consumption since the reform and opening up, and ensured the rapid growth of national economy. At present, China’s coal resources ranks the third in the world, while consumption is the first, accounting for 50.31%of the world’s coal consumption, and the reserve-production ratio is only 31. Therefore, the scarcity and unrenewable of coal determine the amount and quality decline year by year, and excess production and consumption, low utilization rate and environmental pollution problems are also gradually protruding obvious, which will affect the sustainable development of China’s economy and society.Considering the speedy growth of industrialization and urbanization in China and the imbalance between supply and demand of coal, this paper identifies factors that have impacted coal consumption in 1985-2011. After extracting the core factors, the Bayesian vector autoregressive forecast model is constructed, with variables that include coal consumption, the gross value of industrial output and the downstream industry output (cement, crude steel and thermal power). The impulse response function and variance decomposition are applied to portray the dynamic correlations between coal consumption and economic variables. Results show that the rose of the downstream industry output will pull on the role of coal consumption more sustainable; Gross industrial output value has the contribution rate of 50% on coal consumption growth, and the influence of the long-term stability; In the downstream industry, the contribution rate of crude steel production is greater than that of the cement output and thermal power output.At the same time, the Exponential Smoothing model is also established to forecast coal consumption in the next 10 years, based on division of seven sectors (agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, fishery and water conservancy, industry, construction, transport, storage and post, wholesale and retail trades, hotels and catering services, other sectors, household consumption), and analyze the trend and the reasons of the development of the coal sector consumption structure combined with the historical data in China. Results show that from a sector division point of view, industry and household consumption account for the largest proportion of total coal consumption; the proportion of industrial coal consumption will continue to rise, but the proportion of household coal consumption will continue to decline. Transport, storage, and post sectors were the largest consumers of coal consumption in 1980, which will become the lowest in the future. Construction sector, despite its lower reliance on coal, has experienced a rise in coal consumption in recent years. The scales of consumption of wholesale and retail trade, hotels and catering services, agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, fishery, and water conservancy sectors were influenced by price fluctuations in the past few decades, causing the fluctuation of coal consumption. But in the next decade, coal consumption of both sectors will have a rising trend. In 2020, ETS model predicts China’s coal consumption at about 3.4 billion tons of standard coal.Finally, based on the combination forecast of the forecast results of two models, in 2015 and 2020, total coal demand is expected to reach 2.86 and 3.98 billion tons of standard coal in China.