Open AccessA striking growth of CO2 emissions from the global cement industry driven by new facilities in emerging countries
Author(s) -
Cuihong Chen,
Ruochong Xu,
Dan Tong,
Xinying Qin,
Jing Cheng,
Jun Liu,
Bo Zheng,
Yan Liu,
Qiang Zhang
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
environmental research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.37
H-Index - 124
ISSN - 1748-9326
DOI - 10.1088/1748-9326/ac48b5
Subject(s) - cement , industrialisation , china , urbanization , natural resource economics , boom , greenhouse gas , developing country , production (economics) , environmental science , unit (ring theory) , fossil fuel , business , agricultural economics , environmental engineering , engineering , geography , economic growth , waste management , economics , ecology , mathematics education , macroeconomics , archaeology , mathematics , market economy , biology
Global industrialization and urbanization processes enabled a diverse cement production boom over the past three decades, as cement is the most important building construction material. Consequently, the cement industry is the second-largest industrial CO 2 emitter (∼25% of global industrial CO 2 emissions) globally. In this study, the Global Cement Emission Database, which encompasses anthropogenic CO 2 emissions of individual production units worldwide for 1990–2019, was developed. A recently developed unit-level China Cement Emission Database was then applied to override China’s data and the combination of two databases is used to reveal the unit characteristics of CO 2 emissions and ages for global cement plants, assess large disparities in national and regional CO 2 emissions, growth rates and developmental stages from 1990–2019, and identify key emerging countries of carbon emissions and commitment. This study finds that globally, CO 2 emissions from the cement industry have increased from 0.86 Gt in 1990 to 2.46 Gt in 2019 (increasing by 186%). More importantly, the large CO 2 emissions and the striking growth rates from those emerging countries, including most of the developing countries in the Asia region and the Middle East and Africa region, are clearly identified. For example, the Middle East and Africa, including mostly developing or underdeveloped countries, only represented 0.07 Gt CO 2 in 1990 (8.4% of the total), in contrast to 0.26 Gt (10.4% of the total) CO 2 in 2019, which is a 4.5% average growth rate during 1990–2019. Further, the intensive expansion of large and new facilities since 2005 in Asia and the Middle East and Africa has resulted in heavy commitment (90.1% of global commitment in 2019), and mitigation threats in the future considering their increasing emissions (the national annual growth rate can be up to >80%) and growing infrastructure construction (∼50% of clinker capacity operating ⩽10 years). Our results highlight the cement industry’s development and young infrastructure in emerging economies; thus, future increasing cement demand and corresponding carbon commitment would pose great challenges to future decarbonization and climate change mitigation.