China says energy efficiency higher than earlier report

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has again revised its gains in energy efficiency over the past four years, suggesting it is getting closer to achieving a five-year energy intensity reduction target at the end of this year.

China pledged to cut its energy intensity -- the amount of fuel needed to generate each unit of gross domestic product -- by 20 percent within five years, from the 2005 level.

The world's top emitter of greenhouse gases consumed 0.1077 tonnes of standard coal for each 1,000 yuan of GDP in 2009, down 3.61 percent from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Thursday.

That marks a substantial revision, since the bureau said in February that energy intensity in 2009 fell 2.2 percent from 2008.

It also revised energy intensity for 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 to 0.1276, 0.1241, 0.1179 and 0.1118 tonnes of standard coal for each 1,000 yuan of GDP, respectively, resulting in revised year-on-year changes of -2.74 percent, -5.04 percent and -5.2 percent for 2006, 2007 and 2008, respectively, according to the release on its website (www.stats.gov.cn).

Previous official data showed energy intensity fell 1.79 percent in 2006, 4.2 percent in 2007 and 4.59 percent in 2008. Those numbers had already been revised at least once to put China closer to achieving its target.

The latest data suggests energy intensity fell a total of nearly 16 percent in the past four years, compared with an estimate of 14.38 percent in the government's previous report, leaving Beijing in a better position to declare it will fulfill its five-year target.

But the government's resolve remains complicated by efficiency losses in the first quarter, when energy intensity rose for the first time since 2006, up 3.2 percent from a year earlier.

Premier Wen Jiabao said in May that "the reverse greatly increased the difficulty of our work for the last three quarters of this year" and the government rushed out a series of measures including pricing policies and administrative orders to improve energy efficiency.

(Reporting by Jim Bai and Tom Miles; Editing by Chris Lewis)