The Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal cited a top IEA official as saying the Asian giant had taken over the top spot in 2009, earlier than expected.

According to the IEA, China consumed 2.252 billion tons of oil equivalent of energy in 2009, from sources that included coal, nuclear power, natural gas and hydroelectric power -- about four percent more than the United States.

But an official with China's National Energy Administration told reporters the report was flawed.

"The IEA's data on China's energy use is unreliable," the official, Zhou Xian, was quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying.

The Financial Times quoted IEA chief economist Fatih Birol as saying: "In the year 2000, the US consumed twice as much energy as China; now, China consumes more than the US."

The United States still uses far more energy than China on a per capita basis, but China is less energy-efficient, the report said.

The IEA, the energy strategy branch of the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, said the data was still preliminary but that the trend was clear, the newspaper reported.

China has embarked in recent years on an aggressive campaign to secure overseas energy supplies and satisfy sky-rocketing demand fuelled by its fast-expanding economy and citizens' increasing consumerism.

Late last year, Beijing announced ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit that it would embark on a major energy efficiency drive to curb growth in its world-leading greenhouse gas emissions.

It has set a goal of generating 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources -- mainly wind and water -- by 2020.

The IEA's Birol told the Financial Times that while the United States had improved its energy efficiency by 2.5 percent annually over the past decade, China had only notched up a 1.7 percent annual improvement.

China still depends on coal for about 70 percent of its energy needs. It has surpassed Japan as the world's largest coal importer, despite its own vast coal resources.

earlier related report
Major nations pledge to improve energy efficiency
Washington (AFP) July 20, 2010 - The world's top economies pledged Tuesday to work together to improve efficiency of electricity-guzzlers from televisions to cars, hoping to eliminate the need for hundreds of power plants.

Senior officials from economies making up more than 80 percent of global gross domestic product agreed on a slew of projects to promote clean energy, belying the prolonged stalemate in negotiations on a new global climate treaty.

US Energy Secretary Steven Chu voiced hope that the 11 initiatives agreed during the Washington talks would eliminate the need for more than 500 mid-sized power plants around the world over the next 20 years.

"This is about taking concrete action and concrete steps. This is not about philosophical positioning," Chu told a news conference with counterparts from the 21 nations participating.

"We know the energy challenge won't wait, and we won't wait either," Chu said.

While the two-day talks were not designed to pledge funds, Chu said that the nations together have invested "hundreds of millions of dollars" in developing green energy and several states said they were boosting resources in research.

One key initiative will look at ways to improve the energy efficiency of home appliances such as televisions, which the US Energy Department estimated would reduce the need for about 80 power plants by 2030.

A number of nations will participate in the appliance research, including the United States, Japan, South Korea, India and European nations.

In another initiative, Britain and Australia promised to take the lead in accelerating work on so-called carbon capture and storage (CCS) -- which lowers the output of carbon, which is blamed for global warming, from power plants.

CCS is considered crucial for the future of coal, which provides more than one quarter of the world's energy supply and is politically sensitive in major polluters such as Australia, China and the United States.

"We have literally only 10 years to scale up and deploy CCS globally," said Chris Huhne, Britain's minister for energy and climate change.

"Each year of delay will lock in an increased amount of old technology which we won't get rid of," he said.

Another initiative will look at ways to collaborate in design efficiency standards for large buildings including factories -- which account for more than half of global energy use.

Governments will take part in the building initiative as will the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and corporations including US retail giants Walmart and Target, Japanese automaker Nissan and the Tokyo Electric Power Co.

Nations also agreed to exchange notes on one another's pilot programs to develop electric vehicles, as well as to coordinate in designing so-called "smart grids" that manage community power consumption.

The United Arab Emirates said it would host follow-up clean energy talks in early 2011, with Britain holding a third meeting at a later date to be determined.

"We as the UAE very much believe that investing in energy efficiency and advancing renewable energy as well as investing in human capacity building is simply our future prosperity," said Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the country's climate envoy.

Chu said it was important to look more broadly at energy than immediate tasks, including the three-month-old US struggle to halt the giant BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

"If you... go forward only reacting to immediate crises and not looking forward and ahead at things, we will, to use a pun, get ourselves into deep water," he said.

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