CO2 emissions and reduction potential in China’s chemical industry

GHG (Increasing greenhouse gas) emissions in China imposes enormous pressure on China’s government and society. The increasing GHG trend is primarily driven by the fast expansion of high energy-intensive sectors including the chemical industry. This study investigates energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the processes of chemical production in China through calculating the amounts of CO2 emissions and estimating the reduction potential in the near future. The research is based on a two-level perspective which treats the entire industry as Level one and six key sub-sectors as Level two, including coal-based ammonia, calcium carbide, caustic soda, coal-based methanol, sodium carbonate, and yellow phosphorus. These two levels are used in order to address the complexity caused by the fact that there are more than 40 thousand chemical products in this industry and the performance levels of the technologies employed are extremely uneven. Three scenarios with different technological improvements are defined to estimate the emissions of the six sub-sectors and analyze the implied reduction potential in the near future. The results highlight the pivotal role that regulation and policy administration could play in controlling the CO2 emissions by promoting average technology performances in this industry.