Reduced carbon emission estimates from fossil fuel combustion and cement production in China : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

Reduced carbon emission estimates from fossil fuel combustion and cement production in China : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

 Nearly three-quarters of the growth in global carbon emissions from the
burning of fossil fuels and cement production between 2010 and 2012
occurred in China^{1, 2}.
Yet estimates of Chinese emissions remain subject to large uncertainty;
inventories of China’s total fossil fuel carbon emissions in 2008
differ by 0.3 gigatonnes of carbon, or 15 per cent^{1, 3, 4, 5}.
The primary sources of this uncertainty are conflicting estimates of
energy consumption and emission factors, the latter being uncertain
because of very few actual measurements representative of the mix of
Chinese fuels. Here we re-evaluate China’s carbon emissions using
updated and harmonized energy consumption and clinker production data
and two new and comprehensive sets of measured emission factors for
Chinese coal. We find that total energy consumption in China was 10 per
cent higher in 2000–2012 than the value reported by China’s national
statistics⁶,
that emission factors for Chinese coal are on average 40 per cent lower
than the default values recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change⁷, and that emissions from China’s cement production are 45 per cent less than recent estimates1