China Energy Outlook 2020 - Flipbook - Page 38
China’s consumption of natural gas has been growing more than 10% per year since 2001 and
comprised 9% of the total primary energy use in 2018. The increased use of natural gas is
largely driven by air quality and public health concerns related to coal combustion. Traditionally
natural gas was largely used in Chinese industries as a fuel or feedstock. In recent years, due to
the Chinese government’s efforts in its Winning the Battle for a Blue Sky Program (see Chapter
2) to improve air quality, natural gas has been increasingly used in the buildings sector, the
thermal power sector, and to provide heat in district heating networks. As of 2017, 43% of the
natural gas was consumed in industry, 23% was consumed in buildings, 18% was used for
heating supply, and 12% was used for power generation (Figure 1-24). It is also worth noting
that between 2017 and 2018, the largest increase in natural gas consumption was in the
thermal power and heating supply sectors as a result of the government target of shifting from
coal to gas and from coal to electricity.
Primary electricity – that is, electricity produced by hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear
power, and other sources not generated through combustion transformation and converted to
standardized energy units using the direct equivalent method13 – has grown from a 1.2% share
in 1980 to 6% in 2018. The growth in primary electricity consumption has closely tracked the
expansion of solar, wind, and other renewable electricity capacity, which have been rapidly
expanding since 2010, with an increase of 11% in generation from these primary electricity
sources between 2017 and 2018.
To expand the role of primary electricity in the national energy mix, China established a
national target for the share of non-fossil energy to be 15% by 2020 and 20% by 2030.14 This
target is expressed and calculated by converting primary electricity to standardized energy units
using the Power Plant Coal Consumption method. Based on the figures available in China’s
national energy balance, the share of non-fossil energy has risen steadily since 2012, reaching
13.3% in 2017 and 14.3% in 2018 (Figure 1-18) (Liu, 2019).
13
To convert primary electricity into standardized energy units such as Mtce, China uses the “Power Plant Coal
Consumption” method based on the amount of energy used in power plants in a year, and thus treats primary
electricity as if it were generated in a fossil-fuel power plant; unless otherwise noted, this report uses the Direct
Equivalent method, adopted by the IPCC as well, that values primary electricity at its calorific value. For further
details on these and other conversion conventions, see Lewis et al., 2015.
14
This includes biomass power generation but excludes direct residential use of biomass.
24