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Regional imbalance in development is amongst the most important challenges for China. As the country’s leading economic engines, three major economic circles representing 6.5% of the national land territory contributed to more than 2/5 of national gross domestic product (GDP). This paper focuses on the impact of these three growth poles in China’s regional development, particularly for their embodied energy uses in light of multi-regional input-output analysis. Significantly, the three developed areas generated huge demands for embodied energy, 1237.52 Mtce and 40.1% of the total domestic supply in 2010, but far from self-sufficient. In Yangtze-River-Delta , Pearl-River-Delta and Jing-Jin-Ji , 93.1%, 85.1% and 63.4% of their embodied energy uses respectively can be traced back to the energy-supply provinces such as Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi and other trade partners. Over a half of the national interregional transfers of embodied energy via domestic trade were induced by the three economic circles’ final demand, largely resulted from their large-scale infrastructure construction, upgraded consumption structures, high export dependency and ongoing urbanization process. The results indicate that demand-driven embodied energy is a comprehensive indicator to reflect the real energy use patterns of developed regions or megacities and reveal their industrial positions in domestic and even global supply chains. Understanding the temporal and spatial energy transition along with regional development from consumption-based insights is a vital step toward appropriately targeted policy making for the nationwide energy saving and emission reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primary energy requirements have close interaction with resource, technology, environment, infrastructure, as well as the socio-economic development. This study links the entire supply chain of the Chinese economy from energy extraction to final consumption by using input-output analysis and structural path analysis. The results show that the domestic primary energy input amounted to 3318.7 Mtce in 2012, of which 49.5% was induced by investment demands. Despite being one of the world's largest energy importers, embodied energy uses (EEUs) in China’s exports were equivalent to about one fourth of its total domestic supply. All Manufacturing sectors accounted for 44.3% of the total EEUs, followed by Construction for 33.3%, Services for 11.6% and Power & Heat for 3.9%. After examining the embodied energy paths, critical economic sectors such as Construction of Buildings , Construction Installation Activities , Transport Via Road , Production and Supply of Electricity and Steam and Processing of Steel Rolling Processing , and supply chain routes starting from final uses to resource extraction such as “Capital formation → Construction of Buildings → Production and Supply of Electricity and Steam → Production and Supply of Electricity and Steam → Mining and Washing of Coal ”, were identified as the main contributors to China’s raw coal and other primary energy requirements. Restructuring Chinese economy from manufacturing industries to construction and services with huge economic costs cannot fundamentally conserve energy, owing to their almost identical structures in higher production tiers; more appropriate policies on technology efficiency gains, energy mix improvement, economic structure adjustment and green consumption deserve to be considered in the light of upstream and downstream responsibilities from a systematic viewpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]