Fossil fuel consumption in China's chemical industry accounted for 19.7% of the total industrial fossil fuel consumption, and the industry has become the second highest energy intensive sector in the country. Therefore, it is extremely urgent and important to study the problems related to fossil fuel consumption in the industry. This paper adopts the factor decomposition and the EG co-integration methods to investigate the influencing factors of fossil energy consumption and measure the saving potential of fossil fuel. The paper concludes that the influencing factors can be divided into positive driving factors (labor productivity effect and sector scale effect) and negative driving factors (energy intensity effect and energy structure effect). Among them, labor productivity and energy intensity are the main factors affecting fossil fuel demand. The largest saving potentials of fossil fuels are predicted to be 23.3 Mtce in 2015 and 70.6 Mtce in 2020 under the middle scenario and 46.8 Mtce in 2015 and 100.5 Mtce in 2020 under the ideal scenario, respectively. Finally, this paper provides some policy implications on fossil fuel conservation. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.