Analysis of road transportation energy consumption demand in China

In this paper, we first analyze the historical trends in road transportation energy consumption and GDP in developed economies to find out the development characteristics of road energy consumption. The two indexes present obvious ‘S’ type patterns. Then, in order to explore the current status and future trend of road energy transportation in China, we employ path analysis to analyze the impact mechanism of the factors related to road transportation energy consumption. Next, we adopt the BMA model to select the core factors related to road transportation energy consumption in China, and on the basis of the model selection as well as univariate (ETS & ARIMA models) and multivariate (multiple regression) models, the road transportation energy consumption is analyzed and forecast. The results showed that the road transportation energy consumption rises by 0.33 percent for every percent increase in GDP and by 1.26 percentage points for every percent increase in urbanization. The road transportation energy consumption in China is expected to reach around 226181.1 ktoe by the end of 2015, and about 347,363 ktoe by 2020.