An Assessment of the Security of China’s Natural Gas Supply System Using Two Network Models

Abstract

Abstract:In the context of climate change, natural gas is becoming increasingly important for low-carbon development in China. The gap between the demand and supply of natural gas, domestically, and China's high dependence on foreign sources, highlights the importance of ensuring a secure system for supplying natural gas in the country. This study applied ecological network analysis, a powerful systems-oriented method, to simulate interactions between different nodes of the natural gas supply system and to evaluate the system's security level. Two network models were constructed at the regional and national layers, respectively, by dividing external natural gas suppliers into multiple regions and countries. These models were used to evaluate the overall security level and related characteristics of China's natural gas supply system from 2000 to 2012. The results showed stable improvement in the system's security during this period. With the exceptions of some specific indicators (e.g., the mutualism index (MI)), analyses of network information and structure yielded the mostly similar results for the two models. In conclusion, a regional layer (RL) network model is considered more economical than a national layer (NL) model for evaluating the overall security of China's natural gas supply system, especially when available data are limited.

The relationship between LNG price, LNG revenue, non-LNG revenue and government spending in China: An empirical analysis based on the ARDL and SVAR model

“…In 2019, LNG imports were 1332.53 × 10 8 .1em normalm 3, increasing by 6.6% year-on-year, accounting for 43.4% of total natural gas consumption, surpassing South Korea and Japan as the second largest LNG importer in the world. 2,5…”

Towards future infrastructures for sustainable multi-energy systems: A review

“…Concerning security supply, various stochastic approaches for simulating the security level for the supply are provided in the literature. Examples related to Europe's and China's supply can be found in [98,99]. In this framework, the individuation of bottleneck is an important aspect, discussed in [100,101] as well as the uncertainty related to the available information ranging from demand to pipe state and characteristics continuously evolving [102].…”

Natural Gas Security in China: A Simulation of Evolutionary Trajectory and Obstacle Degree Analysis

“…However, most existing literature focuses on the perspective of supply security. It is mainly divided into three aspects: Supply security [16][17][18][19][20][21], supply interruption risk [22][23][24], and demand forecast [25][26][27][28][29][30]. Additionally, some authors are concerned about pricing issues to secure the gas market [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38].…”

“…As with energy security research, a number of authors have presented various methods to study natural gas security. Zhang et al [16] and Lu et al [17] applied an ecological network analysis to simulate the security level of natural gas supply systems and evaluation systems. Darko Pavlovića et al [18] proposed a composite index including indicators of Energy Import Dependency Index, Energy Intensity, Gross Inland Consumption, Index of National Economy Dependence on Natural Gas, Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, and Shannon-Wiener Index to measure the security of the natural gas supply.…”