Comparison and Analysis of Macro Energy Scenarios in China and a Decomposition-Based Approach to Quantifying the Impacts of Economic and Social Development

China has been experiencing a rapid urbanization and industrialization progress with continuous increase in primary energy consumption. Meanwhile, China’s changing economic and society structure also introduces huge uncertainty to its future energy demand. Many energy research institutes periodically publish projections of macro energy scenarios of China up to 2030 and 2050, but these projections differ from one another in terms of total amount of energy consumption and energy flows amongst sectors. In this work, we firstly illustrate major differences between existing scenarios based on a literature survey. We then compare and analyze the different projection methods, key policy assumptions, and other boundary conditions adopted in obtaining these scenarios. Then an index decomposition method is introduced with the purpose of decoupling the impacts of economic growth and population growth on the projection to energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Our results illustrate that projections from domestic research institutes tend to be more optimistic regarding clean and sustainable utilization of coal in the future. Also, projections on energy consumption in China are exclusively linearly dependent on projections of economic and population growth in most scenarios, whilst in some other scenarios the impacts of oil price, international trade, and other drivers are also rather significant.