Skip to main content

Mapping urban building fossil fuel CO2 emissions with a high spatial and temporal resolution

International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology volume 19, pages 1785–1798 (2022)Cite this article

Abstract

Buildings contribute about 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in the USA. The estimation of urban building fossil fuel CO2 emissions with the fine spatial and temporal resolution is critical for climate change studies and developing optimal plans for reaching emission reduction goals. This study proposed a new method to map fossil fuel CO2 emissions at the building level and hourly scale. Specifically, a building energy use model was developed and used for modeling building energy consumption at the hourly scale through integrating building prototypes from the accessor’s data, the number of floors from remote sensing data, floor area from footprint data, and energy use intensity from the Energy Plus model. Furthermore, the greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator was applied to convert calculated building energy consumption to greenhouse gas emissions at the building level and hourly scale. Research results indicate that the spatial distribution pattern of fossil fuel CO2 emissions is largely decided by building type, building height, and building density. In particular, the largest fossil fuel CO2 emissions are located in the center of Manhattan which is composed of large offices and hotels. In terms of temporal pattern, stable and similar monthly greenhouse gas emissions could be detected throughout four seasons, and two small emission peaks could be found in around July and December which are caused by high cooling electricity use and high gas heating consumption. The hourly emissions patterns also indicate the active relationship between fossil fuel CO2 emissions and daily human activities.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Access options

Buy single article

Instant access to the full article PDF.

USD 39.95

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9

References

  • Abergel T, Dean B, Dulac J (2017) Towards a zero-emission, efficient, and resilient buildings and construction sector: global status report 2017. UN Environ Int Energy Agency Paris Fr 22

  • Agreement, P (2015) Paris agreement. Report of the conference of the parties to the united nations framework convention on climate change (21st Session, 2015: Paris). Retrived December. HeinOnline, pp 2017–2015

  • Andres R, Fielding D, Marland G, Boden T, Kumar N, Kearney A (1999) Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel use, 1751–1950. Tellus B 51:759–765

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Andres RJ, Boden TA, Bréon F-M et al (2012) A synthesis of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil-fuel combustion. Biogeosciences 9(5):1845–1871

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Andres RJ, Marland G, Fung I, Matthews E (1996) A 1× 1 distribution of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel consumption and cement manufacture, 1950–1990. Glob Biogeochem Cycles 10:419–429

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baldasano JM, Soriano C, Boada LS (1999) Emission inventory for greenhouse gases in the city of Barcelona, 1987–1996. Atmospheric Environ 33:3765–3775

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Basu S, Lehman SJ, Miller JB et al (2020) Estimating US fossil fuel CO2 emissions from measurements of 14C in atmospheric CO2. Proc National Acad Sci 117(24):13300–13307

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blasing T, Broniak C, Marland G (2005) The annual cycle of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. Tellus B Chem Phys Meteorol 57:107–115

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Damassa T, Ge M, Taryn, F (2014) The U.S. greenhouse gas reduction targets. In: W.R. (Ed) Institute

  • Department of Energy (2016) EnergyPlus

  • EPA U (2019) Greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator

  • European Commission (2017) EU climate action

  • Ghosh T, Elvidge CD, Sutton PC, Baugh KE, Ziskin D, Tuttle BT (2010) Creating a global grid of distributed fossil fuel CO2 emissions from nighttime satellite imagery. Energies 3:1895–1913

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gurney K, Ansley W, Mendoza D et al (2007) Research needs for finely resolved fossil carbon emissions. Eos Trans Am Geophys Union 88:542–543

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gurney KR, Chen YH, Maki T, Kawa SR, Andrews A, Zhu Z (2005) Sensitivity of atmospheric CO2 inversions to seasonal and interannual variations in fossil fuel emissions. J Geophys Res: Atmos 110

  • Gurney KR, Law RM, Denning AS et al (2002) Towards robust regional estimates of CO 2 sources and sinks using atmospheric transport models. Nature 415:626–630

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gurney KR, Liang J, Patarasuk R, Song Y, Huang J, Roest G (2019) The vulcan version 3.0 high-resolution fossil fuel CO 2 emissions for the United States. Earth Syst Sci Data Discuss 1–42

  • Gurney KR, Mendoza DL, Zhou Y et al (2009) High resolution fossil fuel combustion CO2 emission fluxes for the United States. Environ Sci Technol 43:5535–5541

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gurney KR, Romero-Lankao P, Seto KC et al (2015) Climate change: track urban emissions on a human scale. Nature 525:179–181

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hoegh-Guldberg O, Jacob D, Bindi M, et al (2018) Impacts of 1.5 C global warming on natural and human systems. Global warming of 1.5 °C. An IPCC special report

  • Hofmann DJ, Butler JH, Dlugokencky EJ et al (2006) The role of carbon dioxide in climate forcing from 1979 to 2004: introduction of the annual greenhouse gas index. Tellus B Chem Phys Meteorol 58:614–619

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hulme M (2016) The climate research agenda after Paris: should 1.5 degrees change anything. Nature Clim Change 6:222–224

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • IPCC (2006) IPCC guidelines for national greenhouse gas inventories. Inst Glob Environ Strateg, Hayama Kanagawa Jpn

  • IPCC (2014) Climate change (2014) synthesis report. Contribution of working groups I, II and III to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. In: Meyer CWTRKALA (Ed) Geneva, Switzerland

  • Keeling CD (1973) Industrial production of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and limestone. Tellus 25:174–198

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kennedy C, Steinberger J, Gasson B et al (2009) Greenhouse gas emissions from global cities. ACS Publications, Washington

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kennedy C, Steinberger J, Gasson B et al (2010) Methodology for inventorying greenhouse gas emissions from global cities. Energy Policy 38:4828–4837

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lauvaux T, Miles NL, Deng A et al (2016) High-resolution atmospheric inversion of urban CO2 emissions during the dormant season of the Indianapolis flux experiment (INFLUX). J Geophys Res Atmos 121:5213–5236

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li W, Zhou Y, Cetin K et al (2017) Modeling urban building energy use: a review of modeling approaches and procedures. Energy 141:2445–2457

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Li W, Zhou Y, Cetin KS, Yu S, Wang Y, Liang B (2018) Developing a landscape of urban building energy use with improved spatiotemporal representations in a cool-humid climate. Build Environ 136:107–117

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Livingston JE, Rummukainen M (2020) Taking science by surprise: the knowledge politics of the IPCC special report on 1.5 degrees. Environ Sci Policy 112:10–16

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ma T (2016) All eyes on china's 13th five-year plan for energy. Chinadialogue

  • Macknick J (2011) Energy and CO2 emission data uncertainties. Carbon Manag 2:189–205

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ngo N, Pataki D (2008) The energy and mass balance of Los Angeles County. Urban Ecosyst 11:121–139

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • NREL (2019) U.S. Department of energy commercial reference building models of the national building stock. Technical Report

  • Olivier J, Bouwman A, Berdowski J et al (1999) Sectoral emission inventories of greenhouse gases for 1990 on a per country basis as well as on 1 × 1. Environ Sci Policy 2:241–263

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ramaswami A, Hillman T, Janson B, Reiner M, Thomas G (2008) A demand-centered, hybrid life-cycle methodology for city-scale greenhouse gas inventories. ACS Publications, Washington

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rayner P, Raupach M, Paget M, Peylin P, Koffi E (2010) A new global gridded data set of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion: Methodology and evaluation. J Geophys Res Atmos 115

  • Rogelj J, Den Elzen M, Höhne N et al (2016) Paris agreement climate proposals need a boost to keep warming well below 2 C. Nature 534:631–639

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • US EIA (2015) Residential energy consumption survey (RECS)

  • US EIA (2018) Commercial building energy consumption survey (CBECS)

  • VandeWeghe JR, Kennedy C (2007) A spatial analysis of residential greenhouse gas emissions in the Toronto census metropolitan area. J Ind Ecol 11:133–144

    CAS  Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wolfe RE, Duggan B, Aulenbach S et al (2015) USGCRP global change information system support for the SOCCR-2. In: AGU fall meeting abstracts. pp GC13F-1227

  • Yang T, Pan Y, Yang Y et al (2017) CO2 emissions in China’s building sector through 2050: a scenario analysis based on a bottom-up model. Energy 128:208–223

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhou Y, Gurney K (2010) A new methodology for quantifying on-site residential and commercial fossil fuel CO2 emissions at the building spatial scale and hourly time scale. Carbon Manag 1:45–56

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Faculty First Grant, New Faculty Grant, and Sustainability Faculty Fellowship from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The author also would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, Environment, and Sustainability, The University of North Carolina At Greensboro, Greensboro, NC, 27412, USA

    W. Li

Authors
  1. W. Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to W. Li.

Additional information

Editorial responsibility: W. Li.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Li, W. Mapping urban building fossil fuel CO2 emissions with a high spatial and temporal resolution. Int. J. Environ. Sci. Technol. 19, 1785–1798 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-021-03234-0

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13762-021-03234-0

Keywords

  • Fossil fuel CO2 emission
  • Buildings
  • Energy Plus
  • Greenhouse gas equivalence calculator
  • High spatial and temporal resolution