Natural gas has increasingly appeared as an important policy choice for China’s government to modify
high carbon energy consumption structure and deal with environmental problems. This study is aimed
to develop the logistic and logistic-population model based approach to forecast the medium- (2020)
to long- (2035) term natural gas demand in China. The adopted modelling approach is relatively simple,
compared with other forecasting approaches. In order to further improve the forecasting precision, the
Levenberg–Marquardt Algorithm (LMA) has been implemented to estimate the parameters of the logistic
model. The forecasting results show that China’s natural gas demand will reach 330–370 billion m3 in the
medium-term and 500–590 billion m3 in the long-term. Moreover, the forecasting results of this study
were found close in studies conducted by the national and international institutions and scholars. The
growing natural gas demand will cause significant increase in import requirements and will increase
China’s natural gas import dependency. The outcomes of this study are expected to assist the energy
planners and policy makers to chalk out relevant natural gas supply and demand side management
policies.