This data accompanies a recent publication in The Geographical Journal China's Belt and Road Initiative and the emerging geographies of global urbanisation co-authored with Joe Williams (University of Bristol) and Stefan Bouzarovski (The University of Manchester).
Our analysis shows that the BRI covers a wide range of energy‐related infrastructure projects, including the opening up of new sites of extraction (e.g., liquid natural gas in the Arctic, solar farms in North Africa, hydropower in Laos), facilities for processing (e.g., refineries), new transportation routes (e.g., electricity transmission, oil and gas pipelines, port developments), developing alternative forms of generation (e.g., waste‐to‐energy), and facilitating consumption (e.g., district heating, electrification programmes). Projects are clustered around China’s western and southern borders, as well as East Africa and around the nodes of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. As noted earlier, energy‐related investments under the BRI have overwhelmingly been in carbon ‐intensive and fossil‐fuel‐dependent technologies. As such, coal and liquid natural gas (LNG) projects are dominant, but there has also been investment in renewables, notably hydropower.
The mapping illustrates how the node/corridor geographies of the BRI are less linear and more complex than common representations would suggest. The projects shown on the map reflect a diverse range of energy‐related interests, which taken together, represent one of the met abolic forms of planetary urbanisation. Certainly, many projects are explicitly intended to extract energy from other countries for consum ption in China’s urban and industrial regions. For example, China and Russia’s cooperation on the Yamal LNG project is openin g up new extractive hinterlands. And Laos has been described as a “battery” for China because of the scale of hydropower development underway in the region. Many other projects, however, are not directly driven by a need to secure energy flows for China’s consumption, but are oriented more towards advancing China’s international aid profile, securing construction contracts for state‐owned enterprises and seeking profitable investment opportunities for financiers.
Energy-related projects are provided as a csv. and shapefile. Each contains the name, country, location, status and cost of energy-related projects connected to China's Belt and Road Initiative. All of the projects are at least partially funded by Chinese investors, often the Asian Investment Bank or the Export-Import Bank of China. Project data were obtained from an extensive search of news articles, reports and blogs that was up to date in August 2019. ECN (2016) and BUGDPC (2019) were particularly useful as a starting point for the searches. The list is unlikely to be exhaustive as project information can be difficult to obtain, and projects are regularly proposed or cancelled.
The world countries shapefile is available for download from eurostat. We selected the CNTT_RG_01M_2016_3857 shapefile.