An Empirical Study Fo Energy Saving And Emission Reducton In China’s Petrochemical Industries Under Low-carbon Economy Model

Global climate change and energy shortage, which is drawing attention all over the world, is one of the most serious threats to humanity in the21st century. Governments and scholars all of the world are studying measures to maintain economic growth, and at the same time, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil energy consumption from the points of industrial structure, technological innovation, administrative intervention and market methods. As the largest developing country in the world, the second largest country of energy production and consumption and the second greatest source of CO2emissions next to the United States, with China’s rapid economic growth, environmental and energy problems are becoming the bottleneck for China’s development, and there will be great pressure on China from international society. As a responsible country, China is also actively taking measures to deal with the problems of environment and energy, so the implementation of energy-saving and emission reduction, developing low-carbon economy have became the inevitable choice of our country.China’s petrochemical industries are playing an important role in China’s economic development. However, the industries consume large amounts of energy and have become primary sources of carbon emission.In this paper, the change in energy consumption from China’s petrochemical industries between1998and2007was quantitatively analyzed with the Log-Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) method, which was decomposed into economic activity effects, industrial structural effects, and technical effects. And the contribution of economic activity effects, industrial structural effects, and technical effects to the change of carbon emissions was researched also by the LMDI method. At last, we used the grey theory and the method of scenario analysis to study the impact of carbon trading system on China Petrochemical industries based on the different carbon emission quota distribution mechanism.The results show that economic activity is the most important factor driving energy consumption and carbon emission growth in China’s petrochemical industries; structural shift has had certain decremental effects on energy consumption and carbon emissions; adjustment of the industrial structure by developing low-carbon-emission industrial sectors should be a better choice for reducing carbon emissions; the impact of energy intensity and carbon emissions intensity change have varied considerably without showing any clear decremental effect trend over the period of1998-2007. In the three carbon allocation cases in this study, namely "Equally weighting, Preferring capacity, Preferring historical emission", respectively corresponding to the petrochemical industries’ changes in GDP are-0.88%,-1.01%,-0.75%, which can be understood as the three distribution mode have resulted in a net reduction cost, only" Preferring historical emission" caused the minimum GDP loss from this point of global economic development, this program may be a better choice.