A high-ranking Chinese official has publicly admitted for the first time that his country is on the verge of overtaking the United States to become the world’s biggest energy consumer.

The world’s second-largest economy has been under mounting pressure to transform its economic development pattern, further improve energy efficiency and diversify its energy-supply mix, said Ding Zhimin, Deputy Director-General of China’s Policy and Law Department of the National Energy Administration.

“As there are no final statistics (for energy consumption), we are still the second-biggest energy consumer.

But very soon we will take first place,” the official was quoted by state-run China Daily as saying at a panel discussion at the European Parliament organised by the Beijing-based Europe-China Clean Energy Centre in Brussels.

It’s the first time that a Chinese official has publicly admitted that the country will soon overtake the US, the Daily said. However, China’s per capita energy consumption is far lower than that of the US, the official said.

The National Bureau of Statistics unveiled preliminary data in February, showing that China’s total energy consumption in 2010 was 3.25 billion tonne of coal-equivalent (TCEs), up 5.9 per cent in 2009.

However, the rate of increase is slower than the country’s economic growth of 10.3 per cent year-on-year in 2010.

However, those figures are still unverified and the official did not reveal when China will finalise the energy statistics for 2010. Meanwhile, the US has yet to announce its energy statistics for last year.

Xinhua news agency quoted the International Energy Agency as saying that China overtook the US as the world’s biggest consumer of energy in 2010.

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