Powered by years of rapid economic growth, China is
now the world's biggest energy consumer, knocking the U.S. off a perch it held
for more than a century, according to new data from the International Energy
Agency,
The Paris-based agency, whose forecasts are generally regarded as bellwether
indicators for the energy industry, said China devoured a total of 2,252
million tons of oil equivalent last year, or about 4% more than the U.S., which
burned through 2,170 million tons of oil equivalent. The oil-equivalent metric
represents all forms of energy consumed, including crude oil, nuclear, coal,
natural gas and renewable sources such as hydropower.
(This story and related background material will be available on The Wall Street
Journal Web site, WSJ.com.)
To be sure, the global recession hit the
U.S.
more severely than
China
and hurt American industrial activity and energy use.
Nonethless
,
China
's
total energy consumption has clocked annual double-digit growth rates for many
years, driven by the country's big industrial base. Highlighting how quickly
its energy demand has increased,
China
's
total energy consumption was just half the size of the U.S. 10 years ago.
"The fact that China overtook the U.S. as the world's largest energy
consumer symbolizes the start of a new age in the history of
energy"," IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said in an interview. The
U.S.
had been the biggest overall energy consumer since the early 1900s, he said. The
IEA is an energy adviser to most of the world's biggest economies.
China
's voracious energy demand helps explain why the country - which gets
most of its electricity from coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuel resources -
passed the
U.S.
in 2007 as the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide emissions and other
greenhouse gases.
The
U.S.
is still by far the biggest energy consumer per capita, with the
average American burning five times as much energy annually compared with the
average Chinese citizen, said Birol, who has been in his current role for six
years.
Prior to the recession, China had been expected to become the biggest energy
consumer in around five years, but the economic malaise and energy efficiency
programs in the U.S. had brought forward the date of that superlative, Birol
said.
The
U.S.
is
still the biggest oil consumer by a wide margin, going through on average
roughly 19 million barrels a day - with
China
at a
distant second at about 9.2 million barrels a day. But many oil analysts
believe
U.S.
crude
demand has peaked or is unlikely to grow very much in coming years because of
improved energy efficiency and more stringent vehicle fuel-efficiency
regulations.
The decreased energy "intensity" of the
U.S.
economy is a key reason investors, such as General Electric
Co.
(GE),
have increasingly looked to
China
as a
driver of future growth. Birol said
China
requires total energy investments of some $4 trillion over the next 20 years to
keep feeding its economy and avoid power blackouts and fuel shortages.
Birol, previously an economist at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, said
China
is
expected to build over the next 15 years some 1,000 gigawatts of new power
generation capacity. That is about the total amount of electricity generation
capacity in the
U.S.
currently
and the construction of all those gigawatts occurred over several decades. "This
demonstrates the major growth we are talking about" in energy demand and
capacity growth in
China
, he
said.