“China’s main mission is to protect and fuel its growing economy, and to do that China is engaged in a concerted campaign to grab conventional energy resources around the world.”
-Karen Harbert, head of the Institute for 21st Century Energy
In 2009, China became the world’s biggest energy consumer, according to the International Energy Agency. Its energy consumption offers challenging implications for U.S. national security and foreign policy.
Achieving this milestone underscores both China’s decades-long burst of economic growth and its rapidly expanding clout as an industrial giant. Its energy consumption was derived primarily from building energy-intense heavy industry and infrastructure.
China passed America quickly. Only 10 years ago, China’s total energy consumption was just half that of the U.S. The 2009 IEA report revealed that China used 2.252 billion tons of oil equivalents, some 4% more than America. The U.S. had been the world’s largest consumer for more than a century.
According to Faith Biron, IEA’s chief economist, China will invest more than $4 trillion over the next 20 years to keep feeding its economy and to avoid power disruptions and fuel shortages. Furthermore, China will build in just the next 15 years electricity-generating capacity equal to the current U.S. total. Economists expect that Chinese per capita consumption will rise in the future from the current level of about a third of the average of industrial nations.
Zeng Yachuan, a spokesman for China’s National Energy Administration, disputed the IEA statistics.
Why would China dispute the mantle of being the world’s top consumer? China recognizes that it competes head-on with the United States, the world’s foremost military power, to secure the energy it needs. Beijing prefers to quiet alarm bells in Washington rather than highlight that competition.
The chances of strife between the two countries are growing, however. For example:
China’s on-going need for energy could crowd out the rest of the world, including America. China has made significant acquisitions of oil reserves in Iraq, Australia, Canada, and the Gulf of Mexico to sew up the energy it needs.
Beijing has refused to cap growth in overall consumption of fossil fuels or reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases. Its severe air and water pollution represent critical challenges to the world’s environment.
China gets 70 percent of its electricity from coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. It passed the U.S. in 2007 as the world’s largest emitter of carbon-dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases.
In the past, being the world’s biggest consumer of fossil fuels went hand in hand with being its dominant economy.
Geopolitical ramifications
What are the geopolitical implications of China’s rapidly expanding need for energy?
China’s thirst for oil has increased Beijing’s willingness to procure it from countries whose leadership is staunchly anti-American.
For example, China purchases daily approximately 460,000 barrels of oil from both Iran and Venezuela.
In November 2009, China became the largest buyer of Saudi oil.
China recently completed a 1,100-mile-long gas pipeline to connect its factories and power plants to the vast gas reserves of Central Asia in order to enhance its competition with Europe over this key energy source.
Two centuries ago, Napoleon Bonaparte foresaw China’s geopolitical potential, saying, “Let China sleep, for when she awakes, she will shake the world.”
David Pumphrey, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, summed up today’s realpolitik. “China can now demand a large space inside any energy-policy tent.”
Not everyone thinks the two countries are heading for strife over energy, however. James Woolsey, the former Central Intelligence Agency director, provided a more positive spin.
“With both of us being major energy importers, our attitudes should align more than diverge,” he said.
Only time will tell who is right, but I’m not betting on Woolsey.
Originally published in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune
