Impacts of the natural gas infrastructure and consumption on fine particulate matter concentration in China's prefectural cities: A new perspective from spatial dynamic panel models

Abstract

Abstract China has experienced increasingly deteriorating haze pollution characterized by high concentrations of fine particles during the last two decades, mainly caused by the coal-dominated energy structure. Natural gas is regarded as an effective alternative energy to tackle exacerbated air pollution. In this study, we investigated the impacts of natural gas infrastructures and consumption on the annual average PM2.5 concentrations covering 204 of China's prefecture-level cities during the period from 2008 to 2016. To take the potential spatial spillovers and dynamics of PM2.5 concentrations into consideration, the appropriate dynamic spatial econometric models were mainly utilized. The main findings of the study are that the deployment of natural gas pipelines and gas consumption can effectively mitigate the PM2.5 concentrations. The existence of a significant spatial correlation of PM2.5 concentrations at the city level implies that PM2.5 concentrations in different regions influence each other, especially PM2.5 hot-spots can disperse to the surrounding areas. Our results also emphasize that the environmental effect exhibits obvious heterogeneity in the user and regional aspects, and, since the results are relatively robust in various model specifications and subsamples, our findings hold significant implications for the Chinese PM2.5 alleviation policy.