| In recent years,China has been the world’s largest contributors to global greenhouse gas emission with the largest and most serious smog haze,therefore has faced tremendous environmental pressure.The continuous smog weather forced the departments of China’s environmental protection to make efforts to control the proportion of coal consumption in the energy consumption structure and replace them with clean energy.As a high-quality clean energy resource duo to its high calorific value and low pollution,natural gas is the most realistic choice for energy supply cleanliness and shoulders the mission of optimizing the energy structure in China.Under the obvious trend of diversification and cleanliness of energy consumption,the new and deeper research on the natural gas consumption and its influencing factors will help to grasp the capacity expansion of industries stimulated by the rising natural gas demand under economic growth,and further provide some references for the next development direction and policy making of natural gas.Therefore,in this paper,the influencing factors of natural gas consumption in China and its future consumption are analyzed and predicted from both linear and nonlinear perspectives to examine the relationship between natural gas and economic environment.It is of significance to understand the energy security issues in the process of China’s development,and also has a great theoretical and practical significance for understanding the optimization of energy structure and the potential of addressing the issue of environmental pollution in the future.The main works of this paper are as follows:1)Linear analysis of China’s natural gas consumption--based on the LMDI-STIRPAT-PLS framework.According to the current issues of environment and development in China,this paper decomposes the driving factors of natural gas consumption in China step by step by using logarithmic mean divisia index(LMDI)method and obtains some variables that policy makers are currently concerned such as the economic structure and energy structure,and then the STIRPAT model for natural gas consumption and these influencing factors is established.Due to the short length of sample data,the large number of variables,and the multi-collinearity among these variables,this paper introduces the partial least-squares regression(PLSR)method to estimate the STIRPAT model,and the estimated results show that fossil energy structure and non-clean energy structure are the most important factors that impact natural gas consumption growth,followed by urbanization,per capita GDP,industrialization and industrial energy intensity.This provides supports for the method of decomposition that can obtain energy structure factors in this paper which are often ignored in the general literatures.Besides,it is also provides possible for reaching the goals of natural gas consumption or controlling its excessive growth by affecting these factors from perspective of policies.2)Nonlinear analysis of China’s natural gas consumption--based on the smooth transition regression(STR)model.In view of the results of linear analysis and non-linear characteristics that are continuously occurred in the current development of energy and economic,this paper selects the variables that may have non-linear relationship with the consumption of natural gas,such as GDP per capita,industrialization and urbanization,all of them should be included into the research of nonlinear effects.And then,the non-linear STR model is established to investigate the non-linear relationship among them.After the unit root test,the cointegration test and the non-linear test,the GDP per capital is determined as the transition variable according to endogeneity of the STR model.This suggests that the economic development in China has a significant nonlinear and dynamic impact on the consumption of natural gas,this mechanism has further make the relationships among industrialization,urbanization and natural gas consumption more complicated.3)Scenario analysis of China’s natural gas consumption changes.When making the prediction,this paper mainly compares the prediction results that obtained by the multivariate linear model and the non-linear model respectively to understand the future consumption of natural gas in various environments.In the linear prediction based on the LMDI-STIRPAT-PLS framework,the six influencing factors from LMDI decomposition are divided into economic development factors and cleaning factors,and we set three scenarios for those variables and further nine combinations of different scenarios to forecast future natural gas consumption.Compared with the predictions taken from nonlinear STR analysis,the results show that the economic development with high clean energy system would make a significant increase in gas consumption,and China’s natural gas market will face large natural gas demand.Moreover,even the system of economic-energy under scenario of low economic development and low clean or the clean target is not considered,the natural gas market in China may be a serious supply shortage since 2020.Therefore,the issue of natural gas security cannot be ignored in optimizing its energy structure to meet the demands of clean energy development. |
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