Abstract
For China to reach a semblance of a developed country's energy profile is perhaps the biggest social and economic challenge of the world today.
China's challenges are formidable and they fall into three categories. The first is to find adequate supply to meet the large current and even larger future demand. China does not have sufficient indigenous resources and will have to import and therefore compete with other countries, such as Europe, for Russian gas. The second is China's energy makeup which is still very primitive (70% of China's energy comes from coal, a share that the West has not seen since the nineteenth century). This affects pollution, emissions, and efficiency. The third is geographical distribution with very large imbalances between the rural and urban populations of China.
Natural gas, which currently accounts for less than 4% of China's energy mix but is in great abundance internationally, must increase at least by an order of magnitude in a fast pace. Natural gas offers the only hope as a pollution-acceptable fuel for power generation and, very importantly, as a motor vehicle fuel. Currently, the Chinese use approximately 35 times less natural gas per capita than that used in Western Europe or the United States. Also we estimate that 80% of the Chinese public has no access to natural gas either directly or indirectly.
With this situation, we offer different forecasts of the energy future and present scenarios for natural gas distribution in China by making use of a navigable river. We take into account existing systems and estimate the required infrastructure to bring minimum natural gas (e.g., 30% of natural gas per capita use in the United States) to 80% of Chinese people.
