Quantification of CO2 emissions of macro-infrastructure in China with simplified life cycle assessment

Abstract

The main policies of China have promoted the development of the urbanization and the industrialization. The rise of infrastructure energy consumption shows the process of modernization in our country; however, despite there are a lot of researches about the energy consumption in the field of construction, transportation and other infrastructure, in academia, there are less statistics about energy consumption for the infrastructure as a whole, and its proportion in total energy consumption in the whole country. Thus, this paper tries to characterize infrastructures of China, which include construction, transportation, energy, water supply and drainage, post and telecommunication system by establishing an estimation model of infrastructure system CO2 emissions through national official macro-level statistical data. We employ the simplified LCCO2A method to analyze the activities in each stage and calculate associated CO2 emissions throughout infrastructures’ whole life cycle in China from 1993 to 2012. The results show that CO2 emissions from the infrastructure have rapidly grown over the past decades. The total emissions of the standard coal were 888.16 million tons in 1993, up to about 7.76 billion tons in 2012. The operation stage emissions dominate over the infrastructure emissions, accounting for 80–90 % of the impact. In this paper, on the one hand, from the perspective of the overall environmental benefits, we provide a more comprehensive environmental assessment analysis method for the policy makers. On the other hand, the infrastructure construction of China has periodic characteristic. We analyze the specific features of the infrastructure CO2 emissions in different stages, and put forward emission-reduction measures in consideration of the current conditions, which reflects that the key of balancing the relationship between modernization and environment is adjusting emission reduction policy according to different stages to adapt to the “new normal”. In addition, the method development is also important for future quantifications of CO2 emissions of other sectors in China and beyond.