What do India’s transport energy data tell us? A bottom-up assessment of energy demand in India transportation sector

Nan Zhou, Michael A. McNeil, Stephane de la Rue du Can, Jayant Sathaye, and Mark Levine, Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA

Keywords

India, transport, energy demand, decomposition, bottom-up analysis, data

Abstract

Transportation mobility in India has increased significantly in the past decades. From1970 to 2000, motorized mobility (passenger-km) has risen by 888 %, compared with an 88 % population growth (Singh, 2006). This contributed to many energy and environmental issues, and an energy strategy incorporates efficiency improvement and other measures needs to be designed. Unfortunately, existing energy data do not provide information on driving forces behind energy use and sometime show large inconsistencies. Many previous studies address only a single transportation mode such as passenger road travel; did not include comprehensive data collection or analysis has yet been done, or lack detail on energy demand by each mode and fuel mix.

The current study will fill a considerable gap in current efforts, develop a data base on all transport modes including passenger air and water, and freight in order to facilitate the development of energy scenarios and assess significance of technology potential in a global climate change model.

An extensive literature review and data collection has been done to establish the database with breakdown of mobility, intensity, distance, and fuel mix of all transportation modes. Energy consumption was estimated and compared with aggregated transport consumption reported in IEA India transportation energy data. Different scenarios were estimated based on different assumptions on freight road mobility. Based on the bottom-up analysis, we estimated that the energy consumption from 1990 to 2000 increased at an annual growth rate of 7 % for the mid-range road freight growth case and 12 % for the high road freight growth case corresponding to the scenarios in mobility, while the IEA data only shows a 1.7 % growth rate in those years.

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