Primary Energy Consumption Per Capita – China vs Europe

Energy demand in China has increased rapidly over the last few decades due to rising incomes and industrialization. The country now uses about the same amount of energy per person as the European Union. You can see this in this chart, with new data from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy. This measure of primary energy is based on the substitution method, which tries to account for the inefficiencies of fossil fuels compared to renewables.

Note that this does not account for energy embedded in traded goods, so some of this increase in China has come from producing goods exported to other countries.