Abstract for:Analysis of China’s Oil Supply, Demand, and Foreign Dependence

With a rapid development and continuous reconstructing of economy in China, oil production and consumption become two increasingly significant factors that affect Chinese social & economic development. China became a net importer of oil in 1993 and has witnessed its foreign oil dependence constantly climbing afterwards. China imported 0.38 billion tons of crude oil, with its foreign oil dependence up to 65.4% in 2016, considerably above the warning limit of 50%. Therefore, it is undoubtedly of great importance for China to investigate how to secure the oil supply and maintain the energy security to promote a sustainable development of society & economy in China.

This paper studies China’s oil supply and demand, and foreign dependence by building a system dynamics model in VENSIM, which incorporates key factors that affect Chinese sustainable development, i.e., population, resources, natural environment, society, economy and international relationship. The causality and internal feedback mechanism between each element in subsystems of the model is analyzed and determined. Future scenarios are also discussed by considering China’s different level of development speed, as well as possible changes on policy of population control, pollution mitigation and economy restructuring.