Sustainable development and the trend of changing energy consumption pattern in Iran

Sustainable development means providing solutions to the transient patterns of physical, social and economic development that could prevent some Problems such as destruction of natural resources, destruction of biological systems, global climate change, pollution, uncontrolled population increase, injustice and low quality of human life and the next stop. Energy consumption is one of major problem in Iran that causes unstable environment. Energy consumption in transportation sector accounts for the most share of consumption after household and commercial consumption and has the first grade of financial value among other sectors. On the other hand, the sector of transportation plays a positive and necessary role in economic and social development and certainly, transportation requirements will increase in future. However, since the sector of transportation is one of the sources of air pollution, it is necessary to revise the current transportation systems and the effective management and design of transportation systems. In this paper, we have tried to review the trend of energy consumption in sector of transportation of Iran in a 5 year period. Then, the energy consumption in the sector was compared with the Middle East region and the whole world. The reviews show that Iran is the only country in the Middle East that uses natural gas in its transportation sector. Also, the share of natural gas consumption in sector of transportation of the country was 0.35% of the whole world in 2005. The average growth of final consumption of petroleum products in sector of transportation of the country (6.3%) in the examined 5 year period was more than the average growth of consumption of these products in the whole world (4.6%).For example, in 2005, the share of the final consumption of petroleum products in transportation sector of Iran in the world and in the Middle East is 1.7 and 32.6%, respectively. In recent years, the consumption of gasoline has reached 74 million liters per day with a growth about 10%in 2006. Finally, management procedures are presented for optimizing consumption of energy carriers in transportation sector.