Tracing and excavating critical paths and sectors for embodied energy consumption in global supply chains: A case study of China

Abstract

Rationally control total energy consumption can help China achieve carbon peaking at a lower peak level, and lay the foundation for achieving carbon neutrality. To improve the pertinence of energy consumption control policies' formulation, we traced the China’ embodied energy consumption in global supply chains, and excavated corresponding critical paths and sectors with higher embodied energy consumption, based on critical path and sector extraction framework. The results show that critical paths extracted by China's domestic, export-based and import-based embodied energy consumption were significantly different, due to the different needs of national development and different foreign trade models. While critical sectors were concentrated on heavy manufacturing and energy related sectors unitedly. Based on the global supply chains, China's embodied energy consumption for domestic demands has a major portion of its total, whose critical paths involved in production layers were all China's sectors. This is fundamental and controllable to develop policies aim more at these sectors and paths to control energy consumption. By excavating China's paths and sectors with high energy consumptions as the starts of formulation, policies and implications are given for controlling China's energy consumption, which may improve the precision and effectiveness of policy making.