Abstract
The rapid growth of transport requirements in China will incur increasing transport energy demands and associated environmental pressures. In this paper, we employ a generalized data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the relative energy efficiency of rail, road, aviation and water transport from 1971 to 2011 by considering the energy input and passenger-kilometers (PKM) and freight ton-kilometers (TKM) outputs. The results show that the optimal energy efficiencies observed in 2011 are for rail and water transport, with the opposite observed for the energy efficiencies of aviation and road transport. In addition, we extend the DEA model to estimate future transport energy consumption in China. If each transport mode in 2020 is optimized throughout the observed period, the national transport energy consumption in 2020 will reach 497,701 kilotons coal equivalent (ktce), whereas the annual growth rate from 2011 to 2020 will be 5.7%. Assuming that efficiency improvements occur in this period, the estimated national transport energy consumption in 2020 will be 443,126 ktce, whereas the annual growth rate from 2011 to 2020 will be 4.4%, which is still higher than that of the national total energy consumption (3.8%).
Highlights
Transportation energy consumption is an important growth factor in the growth of China’s total energy consumption because of rapidly increasing transport requirements
The energy efficiency scores of these transport modes were calculated by the program DEAP Version 2.1 developed by Tim Coelli
The results showed that the performances of rail transport in 2011 and water transport in 2011 were the best in terms of energy efficiency
Summary
Transportation energy consumption is an important growth factor in the growth of China’s total energy consumption because of rapidly increasing transport requirements. According to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), 340,120,000 kilotons coal equivalent (ktce) energy were consumed by transport modes in China in 2012, accounting for 14.0% of the country’s total final energy consumption (TFC) [1]. Only the energy consumed by the transport sector (commercial) is considered in these calculations. The transport sector consumed 293,429 ktce of energy in 2012 according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of China; this sector accounted for. 11.5% of the TFC [2], which is lower than that of the IEA. The data from the IEA and NBS are calculated according to the calorific value calculation.
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