Embodied Energy Uses by China's Three Developed Regions

China leads the world in the scale and pace of its urbanization, resulting in unprecedented economic expansion, infrastructure construction and resource demands in the country's developed coastal regions. This paper aims to systematically measure the primary energy uses embodied in final demand and interregional trade of China's three major developed regions covering the Jing-Jin-Ji, Yangtze-River-Delta and Pearl-River-Delta economic circles. Results show that these regions are far from self-sufficient in terms of embodied energy and highly dependent on the energy resources extraction in several major energy-supply provinces such as Shanxi and Inner Mongolia. Developing a consumption-based indicator is important for policy makers to address hidden energy resource requirements and corresponding energy-saving potentials along the entire supply chains.