Embodied Energy Use in China's Transportation Industry : A Multi-Regional Input-Output Analysis

China’s transport sector has experienced a rapid growth in the last two decades, which causes heavy related carbon emissions and environmental pollutions due to its feature of high energy-intensive. A number of scholars have conducted studies to identify the sector’s potential energy savings and to improve the energy efficiency. However, all of them focus on the direct energy consumption occurred during the operation of transport. Indirect energy use along the sector’s supply chain is often neglected. At the same time, regional heterogeneity of transport sector’s energy consumption should also be paid enough attentions. In this paper, multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model is applied to measure the direct and the indirect energy use of China’s transport sector in 2012, where both the provincial and sectoral levels are taken into account. The results are shown as follows: (1) Energy use embodied in intermediate use is the most, which indicats that transport sector mainly serves for delivery of products and services. (2) Provinces are classified based on energy use and energy intensity, where most provinces in eastern region have high energy consumption and relatively low energy intensity and most provinces in central and western regions have relatively low energy use and high energy intensity; (3) From the perspective of energy transfer with the other sectors, energy sectors are the main providers for transport, while it supplies most energy to service sector and construction sector; (4) From the perspective of inter-provincial energy transfer, transport sector’s energy flows from resource-intensive provinces located in central and western China to resource-deficient provinces in eastern China. Besides, a close geographical connection exists in the energy transfer. Based on the results, energy policies from the sectoral and provincial level are provided for policymakers