Just when it committed last year to lessen, if not totally eradicate, its dependency on coal to fuel its energy requirements via a sworn participation into the Kyoto Protocol, China's energy use, and parallel coal consumption usage, has risen by 7 per cent over a year ago, based on preliminary calculations by the National Bureau of Statistics released on Wednesday.

Overall energy consumption for 2011 by the world's second-largest economy hit 3.48 billion metric tonnes of standard coal equivalent, the bureau said in its website. Based on data and calculations by Bloomberg, the latest figures were the country's fastest energy use growth rate pace since 2007.

Consequently, coal consumption by China, one of the world's three biggest environmental polluters including the U.S. and India, jumped by 9.7 per cent. It was the biggest percentage annual growth posted since 2005, and shows just how much work China needs to do in order to make effective its 2012 pollution reduction goals working.

"The nation's energy use has been supported by strong coal demand," analyst Aochao Wang said in Bloomberg News. "The increased use of coal constrains the nation's efforts in improving energy efficiency."

In December, China announced that it aims to reduce by 2 per cent its sulfur dioxide (SO2) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) as well as ammonia nitrogen by 1.5 per cent for 2012, apart from maintaining zero growth in the emission of nitrogen oxides. In the same month, under the Kyoto Protocol, China swore to cooperate toward an international treaty that would include limiting the fossil fuel emissions of both industrialised nations as well as emerging economies like theirs.

As a whole, China wants to slash by 16 per cent its energy intensity in the five years through 2015.

Further data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed power consumption grew 11.7 per cent, crude oil use soared by 2.7 per cent as well as natural gas utilization by 12 per cent.

In BP's Statistical Review of World Energy 2011, China has overtaken the US and EU as the world's largest consumer in 2010.

The report showed that China, in 2010, used up 20.3 per cent of the world's energy, compared with the US at only 19.0 per cent and the EU at 14.4 per cent.

Even the International Energy Agency (IEA), in its World Energy Outlook released in November 2011, said China will consume more energy than India, Brazil, even more than the European Union and the US combined, prompted by its growing population and rapid urbanization.

The IEA said China will exchange positions with the US to become the world's largest consumer in 2035. IEA predicted China will consume nearly 70 per cent more energy than the U.S.