Life-cycle water uses for energy consumption of Chinese households from 2002 to 2015

Abstract

China's household energy demands' life-cycle water uses from to 2015 are quantified with an Input-Output analysis disaggregating rural and urban impacts. 9.73 and 1.60 km 3 of water was withdrawn and consumed respectively in the life cycle of Chinese household energy demands in 2015, which was dominated by power and heat uses. An average urbanite's household energy uses, including coal, gas, petroleum products, power and heat, require about four times of life-cycle water uses than its rural counterpart. Among all upstream sectors, while agricultural sectors accounted for the largest shares for all energy uses, oil and gas extraction made significant contributions to petroleum products and gas consumption. A Structural Decomposition Analysis is conducted to disentangle the impacts of four driving factors, i.e. population, demand, economic structure and technology.Population change reduced energy consumption's life-cycle water use for rural households but increased that for urban households. Each economic sector's water intensity decreases, which represent technology advancement, played the dominant role curbing household energy consumption's life-cycle water uses. While power and heat dominates the household energy use profile, urbanization is accompanied by household consumption shifting from coal to gas and petroleum products. In order to reduce household energy consumption's impacts and reliance on water resources, it is imperative to reduce energy production's water use by adopting water-saving technologies, such as air cooling, as well as to reduce upstream sectors' water intensities, such as by promoting drip irrigation.

A regional assessment of the water embedded in the US electricity system

“…water consumption physically in a region or water consumption per unit of electricity consumed in a region), and more regions (and see, e.g. [42,[46][47][48][49]) to expand on the existing literature on water for electricity.…”

Comparing water footprint and water scarcity footprint of energy demand in China’s six megacities

“…Increasing water consumption as a result of rising energy demand may be compromised by potential water scarcities throughout the life-cycle supply chain, especially under climate change scenarios. These potential conflicts are particularly pronounced in rapidly developing economies such as China, where population growth in megacities and bourgeoning lifestyles are exerting increasing environmental pressures both within and beyond city boundaries [12]. More importantly, megacities in emerging economies are typically at varying states of economic development, have different economic structures and water endowments, hence it is difficult to identify a unified pathway to decoupling energy demand and water resource impact.…”

Water Degradation by China’s Fossil Fuels Production: A Life Cycle Assessment Based on an Input–Output Model

“…The input-output (IO) model has been widely used to assess the natural resources occupied by a product in its life cycle production process [23,24,[36][37][38][39]. This study assessed the life cycle water withdrawal, water consumption, wastewater discharge, and dilution water for each pollutant by employing the IO model as follows:…”