Via The Oil Drum, here’s a “Pretty Stunning Graph of World Cement Production”.
As the Drum’s “Professor Goose” – aka Kyle Saunders, associate professor of political science at Colorado State University – notes:
“Cement is mainly used to make concrete, and is sort of the “active ingredient” in concrete – it is combined with sand and gravel in roughly fixed proportions. So cement production can be considered a rough proxy for the total amount of construction going on in a country..”
And here’s a China datapoint – in 2007, the country consumed 50 per cent of the world’s cement, compared with 42.5 per cent in 2004.
For more charts – and links to data going back to 1999 – check out this post.