Energy and Buildings 64 (2013) 62–72 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Energy and Buildings j ourna l ho me pa g e: www.elsevier.com/locate/enbuild Embodied energy consumption of building construction engineering: Case study in E-town, Beijing M.Y. Han a , G.Q. Chen a,b,* , Ling Shao a , J.S. Li a , A. Alsaedi b , B. Ahmad b , Shan Guo a , M.M. Jiang c , Xi Ji d a State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China b NAAM Group, King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia c Institute of Low-carbon Industry, BDA Ltd, Beijing 100176, PR China d School of Economics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 21 August 2012 Received in revised form 26 March 2013 Accepted 14 April 2013 Keywords: Hybrid method Embodied energy Energy consumption Construction engineering a b s t r a c t Presented in this paper is a detailed embodied energy consumption evaluation framework for build- ing construction engineering. The building construction engineering comprises nine sub-projects, which are Structure and outside decoration engineering, Primary decoration engineering, Electrical engineering, Water supply and drainage engineering, HVAC engineering, Civil engineering, Municipal electrical engineer- ing, Municipal water supply and drainage engineering and Gardening engineering. Our study chooses the construction engineering of a cluster of landmark commercial buildings in E-town, Beijing (Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, BDA) as a case. As far as we know, this study is the first attempt to account the embodied energy consumption for building construction engineering based on the most exhaustive first-hand project data with about 1000 input items in the Bill of Quantities (BOQ). The embodied energy consumption of construction engineering is quantified as 7.15E+14 J. Structure and outside decoration engineering contributes more than half of the total embodied energy consumption, followed by Primary decoration engineering’s 23% and Electrical engineering’s 3%, respectively. As for the input items, the sum of the embodied energy consumption by steel, cement, lime and metal products is more than 3/4 of the total embodied energy consumption. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction According to Energy Information Administration (EIA), building- related energy consumption (5.3 million tons of standard coal) accounts for about 29% of the global energy consumption in 2007 (17.9 million tons of standard coal) [1], while the proportions for many developed countries are even larger [2,3]. In China, about 1/4 of the total energy consumption is due to building construction in 2007 [4–7]. The earliest building energy consumption accounting only con- sidered the direct energy consumption in the construction and operation process of buildings. Along with the introduction of the life cycle concept, some researchers began to consider the indirect energy consumption which occurred during the building materials’ production [8], in which some major indirect energy consumption caused by some key inputs were traced, such as energy consumed * Corresponding author at: State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, College of Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, PR China. Tel.: +86 10 62767167; fax: +86 10 62754280. E-mail address: gqchen@pku.edu.cn (G.Q. Chen). by the electricity generation and iron and steel smelting. Most of the existing studies employed the process analysis method to inves- tigate the indirect energy consumption of buildings [8–21]. For instance, the energy consumption of an eight-story wood-frame apartment building in Sweden and a six-story building in the cam- pus of the University of Michigan was measured [14,18], and the energy consumption of some building materials was analyzed [8]. These efforts have contributed significantly to the development of the energy consumption assessment for buildings. However, sev- eral limitations, especially the truncation errors, are also observed in the process based studies [22]. In recognition of the limitations of the process analysis, some researchers tried to assess the energy consumption of buildings on the basis of input–output analysis, under which all build- ings in the same country or region are analyzed as an economic sector. Nässén et al. used input–output analysis to evaluate the direct and indirect energy consumption of Swedish construction industry and compared the accounting results of the top-down and bottom-up methods [23]. A linear mathematical model sim- ilar to input–output analysis was established by Zi˛ ebik et al. to calculate the coefficients of cumulative energy consumption in complex buildings [24]. Although providing a complete economy 0378-7788/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2013.04.006