Extended exergy-based fossil fuels resource accounting of China during 1980–2007

Abstract

Since the resources from environment are in short supply, it is necessary to alleviate the conflict between high-speed economic construction and limited resources in the Chinese society. This paper aims to analysis the variation of fossil fuels resource input into China during 1980-2007 based on extended exergy as an eco-centric metric. With the materials, energy, labor and capital quantified by exergy numeraire grounding on the second-law metric in view of ecological accounting, three indexes, i.e., total extended exergy requirement, extended exergy consumption intensity and extended exergy productivity of fossil fuels, are proposed to depict the contribution of four different production factors from economic, social and environmental aspects, respectively. All the comprehensive analysis based on extended exergy index may be helpful in uncovering the long-term resource depletion and promoting efficiency of the resource transformation in the social-economic-environmental system, thus providing holistic method and systematic view for the decision makers with respect to environmental management.