China's energy demand will not continue to grow rapidly

Since the beginning of the new century, China’s energy demand has grown rapidly. In 2000, China’s energy consumption was 1.45 billion tons of standard coal, and in 2009 it increased to 3.07 billion tons of standard coal, which has more than doubled in nine years, more than doubled from the previous total energy consumption. Shortened by half. The rapid growth of energy demand has aggravated China’s dependence on the international resource market. In 2008, China’s total energy imports reached 367.64 million tons of standard coal, accounting for 11.9% of the total energy consumption.

However, China’s energy demand will neither grow indefinitely nor continue to grow at a high rate.

The rapid growth of energy since the new century does not rule out the low efficiency of energy use. China's energy consumption per unit of GDP is more than three times the world average, 41% higher than that of middle-income countries; the consumption of unit production of 33 major industrial products is 46% higher than the international average. However, the main reason is that China’s industrialization is in the stage of heavy chemical industry. At this stage, the demand for energy consumption is huge and rapid growth, and the elastic coefficient of energy and economic growth is relatively high.

However, this situation is about to see new changes. With the effective promotion of energy saving and emission reduction, the dependence of China’s economic growth on energy demand began to weaken. During the “Eleventh Five-Year Plan” period, China’s average annual growth rate of 6.6% in energy consumption supported the 11.2% annual increase in the national economy. At this rate, the elasticity coefficient of energy consumption fell from 1.04 in the “Tenth Five-Year Plan” period to 0.59. More importantly, this weakening will occur "a qualitative change."

Our country has always sought to get rid of the dependence of economic growth on high-energy-consuming industries and energy resources. However, it has not been realized for many years. One of the fundamental reasons is that the economic development has not reached the “time window” from which energy resources depend. However, during the "12th Five-Year Plan" period, this "window of time" will gradually open China into a stage of high-degree industrialization. It will be dominated by capital-intensive industries and will be dominated by capital and technology-intensive industries, which will significantly reduce energy demand. The growth rate.

Some key and in-depth changes in the industrial structure have revealed the coming of this phase of industrialization. According to calculations, the intermediate demand for industrial products in China has accounted for 68.6% of the total demand, that is, more than two-thirds of the industrial products are used as intermediate inputs in other sectors. From the perspective of China's industrial labor productivity and capital intensity, since 2000, the per capita industrial output value and per capita industrial total assets have greatly increased. The former has more than doubled and the latter has grown by more than 50%.

International experience shows that after the end of the heavy chemical industry, energy consumption will tend to be stable. Take Japan as an example. In the heavy chemical industry (from 1960 to the late 1970s), Japan’s energy consumption climbed from about 100 million tons to 430 million tons, and energy consumption increased by 3.3 times in 20 years, but when the heavy industry industry At the end of high-industrial industrialization (from the late 1970s to the end of 1980s), although the growth rate of the Japanese economy still reached an average annual rate of 4%, the total energy consumption was basically stable at 4.3 to 460 million tons of standard coal. After crossing the heavy chemical industry, although the energy consumption will increase rapidly, the growth of total energy will decrease significantly. The US’s energy consumption increased by only 70% from the end of the 1950s to the end of the 1980s. In the same period, the UK’s energy consumption also only increased. 25%.

However, it cannot be considered that China’s energy demand will stabilize during the “12th Five-Year Plan” period.

On the one hand, developed countries have shifted the heavy chemical industry to other countries, which has greatly reduced the intensity of energy consumption in developed countries. However, due to restrictions on investment and technology cycles, China currently does not have such conditions for industrial transfer.

On the other hand, China’s energy resource management system is still incomplete, and its resource cost structure is incomplete. It does not include “environmental governance and ecological restoration costs.” From the perspective of environmental governance, coal and other products account for approximately 1 The cost of /3 makes the use of energy resources too low. All these factors have caused the turning point of China's energy demand to lag behind that of the industrialization phase.

However, sooner or later in the development phase will prompt a fundamental shift in energy demand. It can be expected that by the end of the “Twelfth Five-Year Plan” and the beginning of the “Thirteenth Five-Year Plan” period, the growth rate of China’s energy demand will drop sharply. By the end of the “Thirteenth Five-Year Plan” period, energy demand will begin to level off steadily.