Assessment of historic trend in mobility and energy use in India transportation sector using bottom-up approach

Abstract

Transportation mobility in India has increased significantly in the past decades. From 1970 to 2000, motorized mobility (passenger-kilometer) has risen by 888%, compared to an 88% population growth (S. K. Singh, India: Implications For Energy Demand and CO2 Emission (Transport Policy, 2006)). This has contributed to many energy and environmental issues, and an energy strategy that incorporates efficiency improvement and other measures needs to be designed. Unfortunately, existing energy data do not provide information on driving forces behind energy use and sometimes show large inconsistencies. Many previous studies address only a single transportation mode such as passenger road travel, did not include comprehensive data collection or lack analysis or detail on energy demand by each mode and fuel mix. The current study will fill a considerable gap in current efforts, develop a database on all transport modes including passenger air and water and freight in order to facilitate the development of energy scenarios, and assess the significance of technology potential in a global climate change model. An extensive literature review and data collection has been done to establish the database with a breakdown of mobility, intensity, distance, and fuel mix of all transportation modes. Energy consumption was estimated and compared to aggregated transport consumption reported in IEA India transportation energy data. Different scenarios were estimated based on different assumptions of freight road mobility. Based on the bottom-up analysis, we estimated that the energy consumption from 1990 to 2000 increased at an annual growth rate of 7% for the midrange road freight growth case and 12% for the high range road freight growth case corresponding to the scenarios in mobility, while the IEA data only show a 1.7% growth rate in those years.