Research On Greenhouse Gas Emissions Change And Reduction Potential In China’s Petrochemical Industry

Since the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly clear that supervisors of many districts or industries are giving consciously great attention to the soulution of greenhouse gas emissions control and moving to low-carbon economy model which addresses to global climate change crisis. With the deepening of energy-saving and emission-reduction projects in domestic, petrochemical industry will face severer challenges for being a major energy consumer and emission industry. Therefore, it is essential to figure out the greenhouse gas emission quantity of petrochemical industry and its change in the past not only for a better understanding past behaviors of the industrial emission, but also for forecasting the potential of industrial emission reduction particularly contributing to alternative energy-saving and greenhouse emission control strategies in petrochemical industry.This paper analyzes the structure and characteristics of China’s petrochemical industry chain at industrial level. A thorough industrial greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions inventory is provided to categorize sources of GHG from petrochemical industry and to quantify the annual total amount and intensity of emissions during 1991～2010. Following that, an empirical assessment of factors which affect the industrial emission change has also been made through building model so as to predict the future emission and its reduction potential in petrochemical industry over next 20 years. Ultimately the paper provides strategies to control GHG emission of petrochemical industry. The paper therefore not only sheds further light on the existing literature, but also provides industrial policy makers with insightful information on tackling climate change, especially provides systematically theoretical guidance and practical basis on energy saving and emission reduction for China’s petrochemical industry. Detailed contents of each part are as follows.The Part 2 of this paper has clarified the GHG emission research progress on stages at emission cost, the allocation and trading on emission rights, emission estimation and influence factors assessment, low carbon economy, which contributes to find out the focus of research about this in petrochemical industry and the shortcomings of existing literatures. Then the thesis analyzes the characteristics of main energy models based on 3E coordination ideas in order to decide which is more suiTable for this paper.Based on the idiomatic usage in industry and in order to keep consistent with the statistical caliber, the part 3 of this paper respectively defines the chain structure of petrochemical industry at macro and micro levels and analyzes quantitatively the development of petrochemical industry and its characteristics of the chain structure, as well as clarifies the new connotation of energy-saving and emission-reduction, its goals and great challenges that is facing to for the industry in the low carbon environment. On the basis of the guidance provided by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the method of total life cycle of product both of which belong to international norms and guidance for GHG emissions to quantify and report, the thesis identifies respectively emission sources from petrochemical industry, the results help to an empirical research subsequently on identifying and calculating the GHG emission from petrochemical production process with the case of hydrogen production by Hydrocarbons Conversion Method.The thesis of part 4 firstly clarifies primary ideas on calculating GHG emission of petrochemical industry based on comparing the difference between the two methodologies provided by IPCC guidance and API outline. Then a calculating model taking into account the direct and indirect emissions has been built, which contributes to estimate the annual GHG emission from final energy consumption of the industry during 1991-2010. Based on the calculating result the thesis analyzes the characteristics of emission change in the past 20 years with the chart method.To examine factors affecting the industrial GHG emission, Part 5 of this paper creates an extended STIRPAT-inspired model for petrochemical industry that provides a set of empirical evidence about which are the impact factors and how much they act on the annual emission of all the industry. These results imply that factors mainly are as follows:invest scale, industrial development level, energy intensity and energy structure, environmental policy constraints, hysteresis effect, etc. All of them have probably a degree of influence at different sizes.Part 6 of this paper constructs the relational model and data structure based on LEAP software to predict respectively the next 20-year GHG emission and its reduction potential of petrochemical industry at basic scenario and policy-constraint scenario on the method of scenario analysis. The results imply that serials of policy on energy-saving and emission-reduction by domestic government and petrochemical supervisor will probably contribute to GHG emission reduction potential at the condition of these policies are successfully implemented.The final part of this paper starts at the carbon budget program set for the petrochemical industry so as to identify emission reduction strategies, separately followed by detailed analysis, such as the controlling of lagged effects, the constraints of environmental policies, the upgrading of industrial structure and the improvement of energy saving technology.