ABSTRACT
China’s energy demand and the resources needed to meet that demand have become one of the most prominent issues in international discussions of energy. The emergence of China’s energy demand commands academic and policy research, and even media coverage. In our earlier studies of China’s energy demand as it relates to transportation and urbanization (Gates and Yin, 2002; Yin and Gates, 2002), we took more of a long-term view and raised the possibility that, even if China’s economy continued to grow rather slowly – which was the prevailing perception at the time – there would still be a strong demand for car and truck fuel and for electricity and other clean energy resources for urban development, which would present major challenges. The economic expansion and the re-emergence of strong growth in energy demand over the past two years have clearly raised the level of interest in these topics. China’s national oil companies now show up in all parts of the world aggressively looking for energy resources. Industry experts are now eager to quantify how much energy China is consuming today and whether the explosive growth of the recent past will continue or not.
