Assessing the Impact of Pro-Environmental Factors on Sustainable Gasoline Consumption and Pollution Control by Saudi Arabian Residents

Saudi Arabia is one of the most oil-rich countries in the world, and oil production is the country's primary source of income. The aspects of greenhouse gas emissions and the harm they cause to the environment and residents were overlooked because of the continuous emphasis on economic growth and a high reliance on oil resources. Consequently, the environmental issues have become challenging for residents and questionable for industries. Despite various environmental awareness and pollution control studies around the world, Saudi Arabia's pollution rate appears to be increasing. The study attempted to understand the impact of pro-environmental factors on pollution control and sustainable gasoline consumption in order to ll a research gap in the literature. Environmental awareness, self-ecacy and self-identity, ecological attitude, contextual factors, and social norms were considered as factors to investigate local residents’ sustainable consumption and pollution control behaviour. The primary data was collected from 216 local residents and analyzed using multiple regression. The results demonstrated the positive signicant impact of pro-environmental variables on sustainable consumption and efforts to pollution control. The study further presents practical implications for the Saudi government and environmentalists.


Introduction
Technology has advanced so much in exploring oil wells and producing them. Johnston et al., 2019 stated there will be a partial or full adverse effect on the overall environment. Though the positive sides of oil production increase the national income and infrastructure, the negative side of its production pollutes the air, soil and water. Therefore, the positive aspects are constantly focused on oil production, ignoring Since 2009, the increase in consumption of oil resources has been increasing, and in 2018 it was the lowest consumption of barrels per day. Due to extreme climatic conditions, reaching 50 degrees Celsius during summer and falling below 0 degrees Celsius in some regions during winter. So, to meet the cooling requirements through air conditioners, most of the consumption of crude oil was predominantly used for the production of electricity and the next largest consumer was the road transportation sector (MEP, 2015a). So power consumption has elevated by tenfold during the last few decades, but the demand for gasoline in road transportation has raised from 25 million barrels to 204 million barrels in 2015, which is on an average of 6 percent per annum ((MEP, 2015a). The central department of statistics and information (CDSI), expected population growth of roughly 30 million residents, which accounted for a 2.6% increase in 2014, and this may further upsurge the demand for gasoline for residents to commute inside the country. So there is a potential growth in gasoline products with the increase in the population and consequently intensifying carbon emissions. As the controversial, awareness of environmental issues and consumption patterns are below the expected level among the Saudi population. Also, it is essential to conduct scienti c studies in the Saudi Arabia context on awareness of climate change, its adverse effect on the ecosystem, and sustainability. Therefore, there is an immense need to create a positive attitude towards environmental protection and sustainable consumption. Therefore, this research study is projected to understand the role of environmental factors and the commitment of Saudi residents to pollution control and sustainable consumption of gasoline products which are used in daily life.

Literature Review
Saudi Arabia's economic growth steadily increased after identifying the oil sources and oil production.
Though the extant literature explains the adverse impact of oil production and consumption patterns on ecological development, there is a signi cant amount of ignorance among consumers about proenvironmental behaviour and adherence to sustainable consumption patterns. Therefore, the literature is presented in two folds. Firstly, it will expose the crude oil consumption patterns and gasoline demand and pricing policies in the last decades. Secondly, it presents the theoretical aspects of pro-environmental behaviour that drive consumers to sustainable consumption and pollution control.

Crude oil consumption pattern in Saudi Arabia
Among the countries in the world, Saudi Arabia is one of the geographical locations which faces extreme hot climatic conditions in Saudi Arabia. Especially during summer, there is a high demand for electricity consumption among industries and residents due to the increase in use of air conditioning systems.
According to the joint organizations data initiative (JODI), the nation burned a huge amount of crude oil, 0.9 million barrels per day during the month of July. It has been recorded as the highest consumption of crude oil since August 2010. In comparison, the consumption of crude oil from 2009 to 2013 for power generation was 0.7 million barrels per day. During the same period, other Middle East countries like Kuwait and Iraq ranked rst and second in crude oil consumption, with approximately 0.08 million barrels per day. While most countries depend on consuming natural gas or coal for electricity production, the nation suffers from the non-availability of local coal production. On the other hand, it lacks such natural gas production operations due to the large amount of sulfur content in natural gas and the low price of domestic natural gas. Hence, foreign direct investments (FDI) found no more lucrative investments in natural gas ventures (Rebecca George, 2014). During the same decade, in 2012, the total electricity consumption has doubled since 2000, to roughly 232 billion KWh. However, this did not pause the nation's economic growth. Rather, it boosted to 4.7% in 2014 from 3.8% in 2013. The central department of statistics and information (CDSI), predicted the growth of the population at roughly 30 million inhabitants, accounting for a 2.6% increase in 2014, which may still hike the electricity demand (Rebecca George, 2014). The sustainable initiative taken by the Saudi government focused on diversifying the sources of power generation and adopted more energy-e cient methods to increase the capacity of generating 58 gigawatts (GW) to 120 GW by 2032 using renewable energy sources like solar and nuclear power. This approach reduces the dependability of crude oil except for producing more diesel (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2014).
Despite the objective of reducing crude oil consumption, the highest record of burning crude oil for power generation was again seen in 2015, with 0.9 million barrels per day. However, as committed, Saudi Arabia achieved a controlled consumption of less crude oil in 2018 for electricity generation on an average of 0.4 million barrels per day, which was in fact much less than in 2009. This was because of the parallel use of fuel oil and natural gases. The comparative usage of crude oil for power generation from 2009-2014 and 2013-2018 is illustrated in gure 1. Natural gases are produced in association with the wells of crude oil production, though these wells are not connected with regular oil production. Hence, the consumption of natural gases also apparently increased (Rebecca and Emily, 2019). Figure 2 shows the comparative consumption of both oil and natural gases.

Gasoline Demand and Pricing Policy
During the last few decades, the consumption of gasoline increased by 6 percent per annum and the consumption per capita is derived from the ratio of total gasoline consumption by the population in the country.
Gasoline consumption per capita = Gasoline consumption/Population in KSA From 2010 to 2018, the consumption increased from 2.44 liters per capita to 3.07 liters per capita. The below Table 1 illustrates more details of the indicators during the respective years. In 2015, the Saudi government increased the price of water, fuel and electricity for domestic consumption, and the price of gasoline for 91 octane grade increased from SAR 0.45 to SAR 0.60 and for 95 octane grade from SAR 0.75 to SAR 0.90 (Tarek N. Atalla et al., 2018). However, the price has changed multiple times during the course of time, and the current rate in the year 2021 for 91 and 95 octane grades is SAR 2.18 and SAR 2.33 respectively. Due to the increase in prices, the estimation of demand and supply curves demonstrated the improvement in social welfare would be approximately SAR 1 to 2 billion per annum in 2010, which amounts to 0.1 percent of GDP in 2015. There are no exact studies which measured the amount of carbon emissions in relation to the amount of gasoline consumption. The study, conducted by Alkhathlan and Javid (2015), attempted to evaluate the impact of total oil consumption and transportation on Saudi Arabia's environment. But the estimation of carbon emissions from the underlying energy demand trend (UEDT) and the transportation sector did not consider the gasoline demand nor the price and income variations.

Antecedents of Pro-Environmental Consumer Behaviour
Following the late 1960s ecological activism, environmental concerns began to play an increasing role in anti-sprawl critiques. According to this school of thought, moderate settlement led to substantial energy consumption, particularly through automobile access. This, in turn, tends to result in resource depletion and increased pollution. Reduced settlement also resulted in a loss of grassland, elevated health issues among citizens, and ozone layer depletion. Attempts to spread environmentally friendly consumption are frequently grouped under the umbrella term "sustainability". Evidently, energy consumption in Arab countries is signi cantly greater. Many ecologists believe that this is a universal human challenge which can only be overcome through strict mitigation measures and metropolis redesign to be more energy-

Sustainable Consumption and Pollution Control
Sustainable consumption refers to people committing to using minimum products, services, and natural resources in order to live a quality lifestyle while also protecting the environment by reducing toxic substances, carbon emissions, and other pollutants. It also emphasizes meeting current needs while also sustaining future needs. As reported by the OECD studies, there is a signi cant difference in sustainable consumption patterns by age. Young people realize their consumption patterns have an adverse impact on society and the environment. They are found to be more ecologically conscious in reducing pollution and contributing to the development of human health (UNEP/UNESCO, 2001). According to a study conducted by Parry et al. (2014), including the gasoline consumption pattern of Saudi Arabia, the price in ation in gasoline minimizes the gasoline consumption of passengers and considers the overall travel distance travelled by them. This approach also assists in putting down hazardous gas emissions, air pollution, and reduces road accidents and congestion. Based on this, it is hypothesized as below.
Hypothesis 6 (H6): Sustainable consumption Environmental awareness has a positive signi cant in uence on sustainable consumption.
The framework of the study is conceptualized as shown in below gure 3.

Research Methodology
This study employed a self-administered questionnaire with closed-ended questions. For the constructed items, questions were developed on a 5-point Likert scale for the study, 5 as strongly agree, 4 as agree, 3 as neutral, 2 as disagree and 1 as strongly disagree. Simple random sampling method has been used to distribute the questionnaire using an online mode by emails and sharing the link of google form among the male and female residents of Saudi Arabia within the age group of 20 to 50 years who employed and salaried in public or private organization and commute by their own automobile. The simple random sampling method gives an equal opportunity for all the individuals in the population having equal chance of being selected for the sample. The questionnaire yielded a total of 216 valid responses, which were analyzed further in SPSS using multiple regression.

Results And Discussions
The study used multiple regression analysis to explore the underlying dimensions of the proenvironmental, sustainable consumption and pollution control constructs and further tested the formulated hypotheses. The below Table 2 (Nunnally, 1978). The factorability conditions were also con rmed by the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value of 0.832 and a signi cant Bartlett's test of sphericity (p < 0.001). • Even in the future, with the proportionate rise in the size of Saudi residents, the overall pollution from gasoline can be controlled through sustainable consumption (PC2).

0.980
The results of multiple regression are shown in Tables 3, 4, 5 and 6. The summary of regression analysis toward sustainable consumption of gasoline automobiles is shown in Table 3. According to the regression model, R square is 0.985, indicating that 98.5 percent of the factor variance contributes to sustainable consumption.

Conclusion
The purpose of this study was to assess the pro-environmental behavior of Saudi residents in terms of their sustainable consumption of gasoline through the use of automobiles and its effect on pollution control. The study demonstrated a positive in uence of pro-environmental behavioural factors on sustainable consumption and a further signi cant impact on pollution control. However, the measures of the constructs revealed that the residents' actions are not so strongly re ective of their ecological knowledge. Most respondents agreed that they travel by car when necessary rather than taking public transportation because public transportation such as metro trains and buses is not frequently connected to their destination. In addition, they feel more at ease and save money when they travel in their own vehicles. They are more in uenced by environmental attitudes when purchasing new automobiles. They may also change their minds based on other factors, namely cost, comfort, necessity, and location. Though the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variables is signi cant, it is assumed that such behavior has recently been observed following the increase in gasoline prices. Such uctuating gasoline consumption patterns and reduction in pollution were also commonly noted by past researchers both within Saudi Arabia and other countries (Rebecca George, 2014; Kagawa et al., 2012).
However, the extent to which consumers' gasoline consumption shifts to a more sustainable level cannot be determined solely by examining pro-environmental behavior and attitudes. It is more important to focus on many other aspects of genuine intentions that drive sustainable or ecological actions, such as the degree to which this shift in models and types of cars used by consumers, the annual average distance travelled by standard-sized cars, the transition from old models to new eco-friendly automobiles, and the implications of shifting between various automobile models. Furthermore, the study made no attempt to understand whether the reduction in pollution and improvement in fuel consumption were the result of a reduction in fuel consumption or a decrease in the annual average travel distance. Also, the study made no speci c attempt to investigate other modes of gasoline consumption, such as consumption of diesel by daily logistics for commercial purposes, households, etc. Furthermore, the results are based on the respondents' ecological knowledge and attitudes toward sustainable consumption. The real intentions leading to their actual actions were not investigated. So, additional studies with a larger sample size are required to con rm the ndings of this study along with other means of gasoline consumption patterns.
As a result, before expecting any sustainable consumption of gasoline or efforts to reduce pollution control, the government must provide adequate public transportation at an affordable cost to the citizens and residents. Furthermore, the government can use a few tools, like ecological awareness campaigns, subsidies and taxes, environmental standards, and stringent regulations to use light gasoline-powered vehicles to encourage residents to consume gasoline in a more sustainable manner and to reduce pollution.

Declarations Acknowledgments
The author thanks to all the respondents who made this possible.

Consent to Publish
The author(s) do not have any consent to publish this research paper.

Authors Contributions
The corresponding author has conducted conceptualization, literature search, original draft editing, reviewed the manuscript, and critically revised the work. designed and analysed the article

Funding
The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests.