A large scale survey of household energy consumption in Chinese small towns was conducted to obtain the fundamental data and analyze the key problems. Based on the survey results, the total annual household energy consumption in Chinese small towns is around 156 million tons of coal equivalence (tce) (4.6 x 109 GJ). The breakdowns include 74 million tons of raw coal (1.5 x 10(9) GJ), 11 million tons of firewood (0.2 x 10(9) GJ), 38 million tons of straw (0.6 x 10(9) GJ), 5.7 million tons of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) (0.3 x 10(9) GJ), 8478 million rn(3) natural gas (NG) (0.3 x 10(9) GJ), 1.5 million tons of charcoal (0.5 x 10(8) GJ) and 160 billion kWh electricity. Space heating accounts for the most proportion of household energy consumption in northern small towns in whole country. Coal is widely used for space heating. There will be a big challenge on energy and environment with a large number of migration from rural areas to small towns during the urbanization. To avoid significant increase of energy and pollutant emissions, making full use of biomass energy for household space heating in small towns is proposed based on the analysis of supply and demand of biomass resources. The results obtained from this study could also provide references to guide the development in small towns in other countries, particularly the developing world during the process of rapid urbanization. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.