Abstract:
Based on historical data of coal production and consumption from 2001 to 2015, the gravity model was built to study the evolvement track and the spatial variation of China-U.S.coal production and consumption gravity center,the evolution characteristics of coal production and consumption gravity center in two countries are analyzed by the movement, velocity and the change of the longitude and latitude coordinate.The study found that the movement track of China-U.S has high similarity in the study period, the overall change track is “northwestward” and the changes are obvious, their movement distances of production gravity center are accumulative 421.84 km and 264.15 km respectively, the one of consumption gravity center are accumulative 208.71 km and 302.61 km respectively.Differences, the average moving speed of Chinese coal production center (30.13 km/a) is faster than the United States (18.88 km/a), and the change of coal consumption center is just the contrary, China is only 14.91 km/a, the USA is as high as 21.61 km/a.In addition, Chinese coal production center has slowed down and the trend of northwestward has disappeared since 2014.