The Driving Factors Behind Coal Demand In China From 1997 To 2012

With the rapid development of economy,especially the constant progress in industrialisation and urbanisation,China's energy consumption has increased annually.On the one hand,owing to China's energy resource endowment being characterised by rich coal,meagre oil,and lean gas reserves,it is difficult to change the coal-based energy structure in the short-term.Thus,coal consumption,which accounts for about 70% of total energy consumption,is of particular concern.On the other hand,although the reserves of coal in China are relatively abundant compared with the reserves of petroleum and natural gas,they are scarce in the long run.The reserve-production ratio(RPR)is only 31 in 2015,far below the global average of 114,China's coal reserves only account for 12.8% of the total reserves in the world.Considering the huge amount of coal demand and the limited resource reserves,the coal resources in China are scarce in the long run.Thereby,the future energy security situation in China is hardly optimistic.Hence,it is crucial to study the driving factors behind coal demand in China.This work uses an input-output structural decomposition analysis(I-O SDA)model to decompose the increments of coal demand in China from 1997 to 2012 into the sum of the weighted average for eight driving factors from three aspects,including: domestic demand,foreign trade and industrial upgrading.Results show that: during the research period,the demand for coal increases by 153.3%,which is increased by 185.4% and 76.4% respectively due to the driving forces of domestic demand and foreign trade;in addition,industrial upgrading can effectively restrain the growth in coal demand with a contribution rate of-108.6%.On this basis,we mainly studied the driving factors of coal demand in six high energy-consuming industries,namely the electrical power,energy processing,metals,mining,building materials and chemical industries.Finally,we proposed targeted policy suggestions for the realisation of energy conservation and emissions reduction in China.