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COAL EMISSIONS

Clearing the air in China

Nature Energy volume 4, pages 904–905 (2019)Cite this article

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Coal power generation in China is among the major causes of the country’s heavily polluted air. Researchers now use comprehensive emissions monitoring data to show that many plants report compliance with new ultra-low emissions standards earlier than required, substantially reducing the pollution they emit.

China has been gradually introducing ultra-low emission (ULE) standards for coal-fired power plants since 2014. Although air pollution continues to be a problem, many Chinese cities now enjoy blue skies on an increasing number of days each year. The improvements, while striking, were yet to be understood in terms of changes in the composition and technology of one of China’s major emitting sectors, electric power. For instance, it wasn’t clear whether efforts to shut down the oldest plants were succeeding, or whether more plants were retrofitted with scrubber technology, or both. Now, writing in Nature Energy, Zhifu Mi, Xin Bo, Laura Diaz Anadon and colleagues in China and the UK show that since the introduction of ULE standards, emissions of the key pollutants SO2, NOX and particulate matter (PM) from Chinese power plants dropped by 65%, 60% and 72% respectively1. The researchers provide new insight into the plant-level emissions changes that occurred over this time frame, and calculate revised emission factors accordingly. They show that a large fraction of new and existing plants invested in emissions control devices that led to substantial reductions in their reported concentrations of air pollutants.

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Fig. 1: Daily distributions of stack concentrations at Chinese power plant stacks 2014–2017.

References

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  1. MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Valerie J. Karplus

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  1. Valerie J. Karplus
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Correspondence to Valerie J. Karplus.

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Karplus, V.J. Clearing the air in China. Nat Energy 4, 904–905 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-019-0477-0

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