Forecast and discussion of energy consumption and carbon emission in China

By 2010, China has become the largest energy consumer and CO2 emitter in the world, as well as one of the largest oil importers. Along with a rapid growth rate on economy, China, realized or not, has to play an important role on international energy market. A reasonable and reliable prediction is necessary not only for the Chinese government and policy makers, but also for the rest of the world. The aim of this thesis is to apply the vector autoregressive methodology, based on the statistics from 1960s, to forecast China’s energy consumption and carbon emission by 2017. The objective is to analyze the trends of consumption and emission, and discuss potential direction of development in optimizing energy structure and strategy on a purpose of enhancing energy efficiency and reducing carbon emission. The results suggest that total primary energy consumption should increase to about 5100 Mtoe in 2017, with an average annual growth rate of 10%, and a consistent carbon emission growth.