China’s Resources, Energy and Sustainable Development: 2020

Worsening climate change has brought grave challenges to global energy development. All countries need to make urgent joint actions to speed up low-carbon transition of the energy sector. China, as the largest energy-related greenhouse gas emitter, plays a crucial part in global low-carbon energy transition. Clear strategic guidance is one of the indispensable factors for the country’s successful transition. With the integration of energy system in mind, this chapter builds on the basic concepts of energy transition strategy and framework of system analysis to elaborate on China’s energy transition strategy amid global climate change. The chapter contains three sections: energy challenges in China, the history, recent trends and future path of China’s energy system, and policy recommendations for energy governance and energy markets. Overall, the challenge of China’s energy transition in the context of global climate change lies not only in the call to expedite carbon emission reductions in the energy system, but also in the need to address other energy issues such as energy equity, energy security, and environmental protection. To solve all these issues, it must consider the unique evolution and changing pattern of China’s energy system itself, follow the mechanism, and meticulously craft the strategy of energy transition (energy revolution) that suits the national situation. Under the policy objectives of the energy revolution, such as capping total energy consumption, peaking carbon emission, and increasing the share of non-fossil energy, China must accommodate energy system integration relative to coordination between energy and economy, between energy and infrastructure and between energy and regional development. To this end, this chapter envisions the “3+1” energy system integration, and proposes to build a regional smart energy system that features the blend of “smart energy farms—smart energy towns—smart energy industrial parks—smart energy transportation networks”. However, this poses new challenges to the existing energy governance system and energy market management. Therefore, it’s essential for China to empower energy planners, spur bottom-up energy innovation, remove the barriers to cooperation between the energy industry and enterprises, and redouble efforts to strengthen the energy management information system and dedicated think tanks in the energy sector.

Urbanization, industrialization and modernization well complement one another. In light of economic development, urbanization meets the demands of industrial production for labor, infrastructure, industrial chain, and low cost transport. On the other hand, rising urban population would spark a number of social issues, including traffic jams, shortage in educational and medical resources, environment pollution, and especially climate change, which has triggered worldwide concern. As one of the world’s largest carbon emitters, China will bear the dual impact of accelerated urbanization and the obligation of vast emission reductions for a long time to come. This chapter centers on the challenges of low carbon development during urbanization, providing thorough diagnoses of the characteristics and interactions of urbanization and carbon emissions, exploring the way urbanization impacts carbon emissions, performing research on the regional differences of how urbanization affects carbon emissions, and the size and pattern of future Chinese cities, thus providing theoretical support to the urbanization strategies and policies for energy conservation and emissions reduction that accommodate low-carbon development.

The low-carbon transition (peaking) initiatives of Chinese cities will aim at meeting SDG and climate change requirements. These cities set their unique targets and paths for low-carbon transition (peaking) based on their own energy mix, industrial structure and renewable energy endowment. Taking Beijing as an example, this chapter analyses the trend of energy consumption and CO₂ emission under varied policy measures and puts forward corresponding policy recommendations.

The energy systems of major countries are transitioning toward clean, low-carbon and intelligent solutions to combat climate change and environmental pollution. The goal to build a new electricity-centered energy supply infrastructure that progressively evolves toward an energy internet that integrates the exploitation, transmission, distribution and consumption of electricity has become a global consensus and object. It is expected that in the future, with continued innovations in power generation, transmission grid system, load and energy storage, and advances in information and communication technology, the structural pattern of the power system will undergo drastic changes. The future transition and development of the power system will be characterized by a high share of renewable energy in the grid, prevalent application of power electronic equipment, multi-energy complementarities and integrated energy utilization, and an intelligent grid network and energy internet with deeply integrated cyber-physical systems. This chapter is dedicated to examining the transition and development of the power system in the three main links of power supply, transmission grid and load. The trends of technological development are analyzed and suggestions on polices and measures to accelerate the transition are proposed.

Water is a fundamental and essential resource for sustainable and healthy development of natural environment and human society. China boasts considerable water resources but is below world average on a per capita basis, and is challenged by the disparity in temporal and geographical distribution and poor utilization of water resources, severe water pollution, etc. As water is closely associated with climate change, change in water resources amid climate change in the future might affect China’s water security. Based on the reality and challenges of China’s water resources, this chapter shall discuss the evolution of China’s water management system and the current water demand, as well as the trend in future. Next, a study of water resources risk and its temporal and spatial distribution in China’s power industry are introduced, concluding with policy recommendations for China to address the challenges.

The fast development of electric vehicle market globally leads to highly dynamic critical metal demands, which brings potential resource and supply chain sustainability challenges. In this chapter, we project future lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese demands driven by global electric vehicle deployment under different battery technology scenarios, and investigate the impacts on resource and supply chain sustainability. The results suggest that future critical metal demands are substantially affected by battery technology roadmap. Considerable risks exist in the supply chains of battery materials. Policy recommendations are proposed to cope with the upcoming challenges.

As iron and steel production features high energy consumption and massive GHG emissions, the low carbon development of the industry is crucial for China’s INDC target. Multi-pronged measures should be taken to grapple with the problems with the industry to secure low-carbon green development. In terms of technical solutions for the low-carbon development of the industry, improvement is more likely on both the consumption and the production side. In terms of zero carbon technology of iron and steel production, hydrogen steelmaking and CCUS are among the few technical options for zero carbon development of the industry. It’s advised to enhance the overall management of China’s iron and steel industry both on the production and the consumption sides, promote R&D and application of new technologies for process improvement, make technological preparations for the recovery and recycling of steel scraps and short process steelmaking. In the long run, theoretical research, strategic analysis and construction planning is necessary for CCUS-hydrogen steelmaking as the goal, in a bid to facilitate the restructuring of China’s energy mix and achieve close to zero emissions in the industry. Before zero emission it will take long time for steel industry to transit. Step abatement of CO₂ emission by technical innovation still is a main focus for most steel works.