Estimation And Analysis Of Coal - Related Carbon Dioxide Emissions

The coal based energy production and consumption pattern of China is determined by its energy endowment that rich in coal whilst lack in oil and gas and is driven by coal power dominated generation system. In fact, coal constitutes more than70percent of China’s total primary energy consumption and this trend will continue in the near future. In the last decades, the amount of energy, especially coal, consumed in China has been increasing rapidly to support its high speed economic development. Consequently, Coal related CO2emission in China increased dramatically, which makes coal is the dominant CO2emission source in China, or even one important source in the world. Therefore, the accuracy of the quantity of coal related CO2emission will directly affect the accuracy of the estimation of national CO2emission in China, which will even affect the accuracy of global CO2emission estimation.International major energy institutions and researchers have estimated energy related CO2emission in China for a long time. However, gaps of estimated results among them are growing larger year by year. As the lack of official data, the problem that huge uncertainty of CO2emitted by China has gain much attention from international society. This work grounds on the reality of China’s coal production and consumption, distinguishes the difference of coal related statistic data from different statistic system in detail, systematically analyzes the internal correlations of these data and their linking up patterns during different using stages, namely production, dressing, washing, transportation and end use; compares with data of coal transferring in and out flows among provinces and at last concludes that there are some problems for the existing statistic system to provide qualified activity data required by IPCC approach. The key problems are as following:First, statistic standards of national and regional statistic system are different, which directly caused the gap between the data collected from national statistic system and regional statistic system.Second, potential carbon emission factor rely heavily on experts’estimation due to the lack of measured data. Actually, it is very difficult for the existing coal test system in China to provide qualified coal quality data, such as carbon content indicator and heating value indicator, which are the basic data to estimate potential carbon emission factor. Take coal heating value for example, the lower heating value of China’s coal has been estimated as5000Kcal per kilogram sine1950s, disregard the fact that the amount and quality of coal has changed greatly, which will result uncertainty definitely.Faces with this challenge, a new approach for estimating coal related CO2emission based on inner-core coal quality data has been presented. This approach fully takes into account of the effect of coal rank on coal utilization and CO2emission. In this approach, the inner-core coal quality indicators are considered as potential carbon emission factor, such as carbon content of dry-and-ash-free basis (Cdaf), total moisture (Mt), dry-ash (Ad); activity data are from China Coal Industry Yearbook compiled by Chinese State Administration of Coal Mine Safety Supervision Bureau, which considered coal processing, utilization and coal quality. At last, a case study of2010China’s coal data has been applied in this framework and the results shows that coal related CO2emission in2010is6.371billion tones. Based on this result, China’s Coal Flow and Carbon Flow chart is mapped.