China's energy consumption per 10,000 yuan of GDP was 1.206 tons of coal equivalent in 2006, down 1.33 percent from 2005, Xie Fuzhan, director of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said on Thursday.

The revised figures compare with the earlier figure of 1.21 tons of coal equivalent, down 1.23 percent, released by the statistics agency in February this year.

Unit consumption decreased because China's GDP in 2006 was revised up by 146.4 billion yuan to 21.0871 trillion yuan, said an NBS official.

It was the first time energy consumption for every 10,000 yuan of GDP has declined in China since 2003, indicating the country was developing in a way that is less wasteful and less damaging to the environment, said Xie.

Twenty-nine of the Chinese mainland's 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities saw their per unit GDP energy consumption decline last year, while northwestern Qinghai province reported an increase of 1.51 percent.

Figures for the Tibet Autonomous Region are not yet available.

Of the 30 administrative regions with figures available, all but Beijing missed the 2006 target of reducing energy consumption for every 10,000 yuan of GDP by four percent. Beijing achieved a 5.25-percent drop.

Seventeen regions managed to cut their per unit GDP energy consumption by more than three percent.

The failure was mainly a result of slow progress in industrial restructuring, said Xie.

"China is in the middle stages of industrialization. Heavy industry and raw material sectors dominant, and they consume a lot of energy and discharge a lot of pollutants," Xie said.

Also to blame were weak supervision and law enforcement and a lack of tax and financial policies that support energy efficiency.

The Chinese government set a target of reducing energy consumption for every 10,000 yuan of GDP by 20 percent in the five-year period from 2006 to 2010.

"The mission ahead is tough but not impossible. We will definitely achieve the target if the whole country makes greater efforts," Xie said.

Total energy consumption in 2006 rose 9.61 percent year-on-year to 2.46 billion tons of coal equivalent, Xie said.

The energy consumption of secondary industry declined by 1.98 percent to 2.53 tons of coal equivalent per 10,000 yuan of industrial added value, while that of primary industry and tertiary industry rose 0.14 percent and 0.13 percent respectively.

Editor: Yan