Dataset Information

Independent evaluation of point source fossil fuel CO2 emissions to better than 10%.

ABSTRACT: Independent estimates of fossil fuel CO2 (CO2ff) emissions are key to ensuring that emission reductions and regulations are effective and provide needed transparency and trust. Point source emissions are a key target because a small number of power plants represent a large portion of total global emissions. Currently, emission rates are known only from self-reported data. Atmospheric observations have the potential to meet the need for independent evaluation, but useful results from this method have been elusive, due to challenges in distinguishing CO2ff emissions from the large and varying CO2 background and in relating atmospheric observations to emission flux rates with high accuracy. Here we use time-integrated observations of the radiocarbon content of CO2 ((14)CO2) to quantify the recently added CO2ff mole fraction at surface sites surrounding a point source. We demonstrate that both fast-growing plant material (grass) and CO2 collected by absorption into sodium hydroxide solution provide excellent time-integrated records of atmospheric (14)CO2 These time-integrated samples allow us to evaluate emissions over a period of days to weeks with only a modest number of measurements. Applying the same time integration in an atmospheric transport model eliminates the need to resolve highly variable short-term turbulence. Together these techniques allow us to independently evaluate point source CO2ff emission rates from atmospheric observations with uncertainties of better than 10%. This uncertainty represents an improvement by a factor of 2 over current bottom-up inventory estimates and previous atmospheric observation estimates and allows reliable independent evaluation of emissions.

SUBMITTER: Turnbull JC

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5027441 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Independent evaluation of point source fossil fuel CO2 emissions to better than 10%.

Turnbull Jocelyn Christine JC Keller Elizabeth D ED Norris Margaret W MW Wiltshire Rachael M RM

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20160829 37

Independent estimates of fossil fuel CO2 (CO2ff) emissions are key to ensuring that emission reductions and regulations are effective and provide needed transparency and trust. Point source emissions are a key target because a small number of power plants represent a large portion of total global emissions. Currently, emission rates are known only from self-reported data. Atmospheric observations have the potential to meet the need for independent evaluation, but useful results from this method ...[more]

PMID: 27573818

Similar Datasets

Project description:Environmentally extended input-output analysis (EEIOA) has long been used to quantify global and regional environmental impacts and to clarify emission transfers. Structural path analysis (SPA), a technique based on EEIOA, is especially useful for measuring significant flows in this environmental-economic system. This paper constructs an imports-adjusted single-region input-output (SRIO) model considering only domestic final use elements, and it uses the SPA technique to highlight crucial routes along the production chain in both final use and sectoral perspectives. The results indicate that future mitigation policies on household consumption should change direct energy use structures in rural areas, cut unreasonable demand for power and chemical products, and focus on urban areas due to their consistently higher magnitudes than rural areas in the structural routes. Impacts originating from government spending should be tackled by managing onsite energy use in 3 major service sectors and promoting cleaner fuels and energy-saving techniques in the transport sector. Policies on investment should concentrate on sectoral interrelationships along the production chain by setting up standards to regulate upstream industries, especially for the services, construction and equipment manufacturing sectors, which have high demand pulling effects. Apart from the similar methods above, mitigating policies in exports should also consider improving embodied technology and quality in manufactured products to achieve sustainable development. Additionally, detailed sectoral results in the coal extraction industry highlight the onsite energy use management in large domestic companies, emphasize energy structure rearrangement, and indicate resources and energy safety issues. Conclusions based on the construction and public administration sectors reveal that future mitigation in secondary and tertiary industries should be combined with upstream emission intensive industries in a systematic viewpoint to achieve sustainable development. Overall, SPA is a useful tool in empirical studies, and it can be used to analyze national environmental impacts and guide future mitigation policies.

Project description:The Open-source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO2 (ODIAC) is a global high-spatial resolution gridded emission data product that distributes carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuel combustion. The emission spatial distributions are estimated at a 1×1 km spatial resolution over land using power plant profiles (emission intensity and geographical location) and satellite-observed nighttime lights. This paper describes the year 2016 version of the ODIAC emission data product (ODIAC2016) and presents analyses that help guiding data users, especially for atmospheric CO2 tracer transport simulations and flux inversion analysis. Since the original publication in 2011, we have made modifications to our emission modeling framework in order to deliver a comprehensive global gridded emission data product. Major changes from the 2011 publication are 1) the use of emissions estimates made by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) by fuel type (solid, liquid, gas, cement manufacturing, gas flaring and international aviation and marine bunkers), 2) the use of multiple spatial emission proxies by fuel type such as nightlight data specific to gas flaring and ship/aircraft fleet tracks and 3) the inclusion of emission temporal variations. Using global fuel consumption data, we extrapolated the CDIAC emissions estimates for the recent years and produced the ODIAC2016 emission data product that covers 2000-2015. Our emission data can be viewed as an extended version of CDIAC gridded emission data product, which should allow data users to impose global fossil fuel emissions in more comprehensive manner than original CDIAC product. Our new emission modeling framework allows us to produce future versions of ODIAC emission data product with a timely update. Such capability has become more significant given the CDIAC/ORNL's shutdown. ODIAC data product could play an important role to support carbon cycle science, especially modeling studies with space-based CO2 data collected near real time by ongoing carbon observing missions such as Japanese Greenhouse Observing SATellite (GOSAT), NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) and upcoming future missions. The ODIAC emission data product including the latest version of the ODIAC emission data (ODIAC2017, 2000-2016), is distributed from http://db.cger.nies.go.jp/dataset/ODIAC/ with a DOI.

Project description:BackgroundSatellite imagery will offer unparalleled global spatial coverage at high-resolution for long term cost-effective monitoring of CO2 concentration plumes generated by emission hotspots. CO2 emissions can then be estimated from the magnitude of these plumes. In this paper, we assimilate pseudo-observations in a global atmospheric inversion system to assess the performance of a constellation of one to four sun-synchronous low-Earth orbit (LEO) imagers to monitor anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The constellation of imagers follows the specifications from the European Spatial Agency (ESA) for the Copernicus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide Monitoring (CO2M) concept for a future operational mission dedicated to the monitoring of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This study assesses the uncertainties in the inversion estimates of emissions ("posterior uncertainties").ResultsThe posterior uncertainties of emissions for individual cities and power plants are estimated for the 3 h before satellite overpasses, and extrapolated at annual scale assuming temporal auto-correlations in the uncertainties in the emission products that are used as a prior knowledge on the emissions by the Bayesian framework of the inversion. The results indicate that (i) the number of satellites has a proportional impact on the number of 3 h time windows for which emissions are constrained to better than 20%, but it has a small impact on the posterior uncertainties in annual emissions; (ii) having one satellite with wide swath would provide full images of the XCO2 plumes, and is more beneficial than having two satellites with half the width of reference swath; and (iii) an increase in the precision of XCO2 retrievals from 0.7 ppm to 0.35 ppm has a marginal impact on the emission monitoring performance.ConclusionsFor all constellation configurations, only the cities and power plants with an annual emission higher than 0.5 MtC per year can have at least one 8:30-11:30 time window during one year when the emissions can be constrained to better than 20%. The potential of satellite imagers to constrain annual emissions not only depend on the design of the imagers, but also strongly depend on the temporal error structure in the prior uncertainties, which is needed to be objectively assessed in the bottom-up emission maps.

Dataset Information

Independent evaluation of point source fossil fuel CO2 emissions to better than 10%.

Publications

Independent evaluation of point source fossil fuel CO2 emissions to better than 10%.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets