Assessment of Historic Trend in Mobility and Energy Use in India Transportation Sector Using Bottom-up Approach

Transportation mobility in India has increased significantly in the past decades. From1970 to 2000, motorizedmobility (passenger-km) has risen by 888%, compared with an 88% population growth (Singh,2006). Thiscontributed to many energy and environmental issues, and an energy strategy incorporates efficiency improvementand other measures needs to be designed. Unfortunately, existing energy data do not provide information on drivingforces behind energy use and sometime show large inconsistencies. Many previous studies address only a singletransportation mode such as passenger road travel; did not include comprehensive data collection or analysis has yetbeen done, or lack detail on energy demand by each mode and fuel mix.

The current study will fill a considerable gap in current efforts, develop a data base on all transport modesincluding passenger air and water, and freight in order to facilitate the development of energy scenarios and assesssignificance of technology potential in a global climate change model.

An extensive literature review and data collection has been done to establish the database with breakdown ofmobility, intensity, distance, and fuel mix of all transportation modes. Energy consumption was estimated andcompared with aggregated transport consumption reported in IEA India transportation energy data. Differentscenarios were estimated based on different assumptions on freight road mobility. Based on the bottom-up analysis,we estimated that the energy consumption from 1990 to 2000 increased at an annual growth rate of 7% for the mid-range road freight growth case and 12% for the high road freight growth case corresponding to the scenarios inmobility, while the IEA data only shows a 1.7% growth rate in those years.