Effect Of Household Biogas Digester Utilization On Rural Household Cooking Energy Consumption

The energy problem is one of the most important problems in China.As the world's largest energy consumer,total energy consumption has reached 3.75 billion tons of standard coal in 2013,and energy consumption was extremely depend on fossil fuels,for example,oil consumption accounted for 18.4%and coal accounted for as high as 66.0%.Obviously,China's energy consumption relied too much on fossil fuels such as coal and oil,energy consumption was huge and structure was not reasonable.As a big agricultural country,rural energy consumption problem was particularly prominent.In this circumstance,the Chinese government began to use mature biogas technology to deal with the problem,and the number of biogas digesters significantly increased because of policy guidance and financial support.By the end of 2011,the number of biogas households(containing centralized gas supply households)have been more than 41.68 million,the number of household biogas digesters was about 3.997 million,benefiting about 1.6 billion people,which means the biogas digesters has been widely universal in rural area.The achievement was indeed gratifying from the absolute amount of biogas digesters.But behind the promotion and popularization of biogas digesters,low rate of utilization or even abandon appeared frequently,so the study on reasons why the biogas households don't use the biogas digesters has a strong practical significance.On the other hand,the purpose of promoting biogas digesters was to solve the problem of energy consumption in rural areas.It's effective to test,compare and evaluate the energy benefit of biogas digesters by exploring the effect of household biogas digester utilization on rural household cooking energy consumption,also can provide reference for policy making.So the research on this aspect is necessary.Based on this,the paper uses the farmer 's behavior theory to build the model of farmers,combined with the results of related literature to put forward a more comprehensive series of factors affecting utilization of biogas digesters,making a quantitative anaylsis by Probit regression model Then innovatively using Propensity Score Matching(PSM)method to explore the effect of household biogas digester utilization on rural household cooking energy consumption.Finally the paper puts forward corresponding policy recommendations.Results indicate that:(1)Family size,the number of pigs,the number of alternative energy sources,distance from village to township,whether the farmers have received the training of biogas or not,the proportion of subsidies in the cost of biogas digester construction and city dummy significantly affect household biogas digester utilization;(2)Biogas digester utilization can significantly reduce household per capita consumption of liquefied petroleum gas,however,per capita consumption of straw,firewood,coal,electricity and total cooking energy is not significantly affected;(3)Comparing energy consumption structure after matching,biogas digester utilization can reduce the proportion of biomass(straw and firewood)and fossil fuels(gas and coal)in household per capita cooking energy consumption.So,utilization of biogas digester has a positive impact on rural cooking energy consumption.Policies aimed at ensuring the sustainable use of biogas digesters may therefore focus on encouraging households having biogas digesters to increase the number of livestock and poultry breeding,regularly organizing biogas training for these households,and reforming the subsidy policy of biogas digesters.