China’s Cement Industry Implicit Carbon Dioxide Emissions Research

Abstract

Cement production is one major anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission source. In China, domestic demand saturated situation caused the rapid increase of the cement exports. Western developed countries, in order to prevent leakage of carbon, will apply carbon tariffs to carbon intensive imports from developing countries such as China. Under the pressure of reducing carbon emissions, it is of important significance to study CO₂ emissions in cement production process. We adopt the plant level micro data in 2500 t and 5000 t new suspension preheater dry-process (NSP) cement production line, and through data analysis, calculated CO₂ emissions in each stage of cement production process, conducted environmental appraisal, measured the amount of carbon emissions in domestic cement production and implied carbon emissions in cement for export. As a result, we found a big deviation between CO₂ emissions factors based on the direct data and in the previous literatures, and believe that the CO₂ emission factor in Chinese cement production may be overstated in previous studies.