Green power trading is a market-oriented way to promote a clean energy transition in China. In practice, China’s leading instrument for this policy, the green certificate, has faced serious obstacles. A new OIES paper by Anders Hove and Gary Sipeng Xie examines the goals and history of the...

Waste-to-energy (WtE) is a waste treatment process that incinerates waste to produce energy in the form of electricity and/or heat. WtE is considered one of the most environmentally-friendly methods of dealing with residual waste. The alternative to this process is waste dumping or landfilling,...

China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of hydrogen. The country has adopted a domestic strategy that targets significant growth in hydrogen consumption and production. Given the importance of hydrogen in the low-carbon energy transition, it is critical to understand China’s...

China is currently the world’s largest oil importer and is on track to becoming the biggest consumer of liquefied natural gas (LNG). This dependency is viewed as a strategic vulnerability, especially as China’s ties with the USA are worsening and Beijing has growing concerns about...

Direct Air Capture technology coupled with geological storage (‘DACS’, also ‘DACCS’) has recently emerged as one of the main carbon dioxide removal (CDR) needed to reach net-zero targets. If deployed at scale, DACS would result in ‘negative emissions’ which would preclude the need...

In 2020, the Chinese coal chemical industry processed nearly one quarter of national coal throughput, and accounted for about 5.4 per cent of national CO2 emissions. Yet the coal chemicals’ industry ability to limit oil and gas imports is appealing to the Chinese leadership in the context of...

Carbon capture, and storage (CCS) is identified as a critical technology to reduce CO2 emissions to achieve global climate goals. The potential of CCS as mitigation technology could be substantial yet deployment levels remain far below what is needed to make meaningful climate contributions....

Energy-from-waste (EfW) is a waste treatment process that combusts residual waste after re-use, recycling and composting to produce energy in the form of electricity and/or heat. In the UK, the EfW sector contributes around 3% of total national power output, but also 3.5% of overall territorial...