Preprints
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-95
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-95
11 Apr 2023
 | 11 Apr 2023
Status: this preprint is currently under review for the journal ESSD.

A global catalogue of CO2 emissions and co-emitted species from power plants at a very high spatial and temporal resolution

Marc Guevara, Santiago Enciso, Carles Tena, Oriol Jorba, Stijn Dellaert, Hugo Denier van der Gon, and Carlos Pérez García-Pando

Abstract. We present a high-resolution global emission catalogue of CO2 and co-emitted species (NOx, SO2, CO, CH4) from thermal power plants for the year 2018. The construction of the database follows a bottom-up approach, which combines plant-specific information with national energy consumption statistics and fuel-dependent emission factors and emission ratios. The resulting catalog contains annual emission information for more than 16000 individual facilities at their exact geographical location. Each facility is linked to a specific temporal (i.e., monthly, day-of-the-week and hourly) and vertical distribution profile, which were derived from national electricity generation statistics and plume rise calculations that combine stack parameters with meteorological information. The combination of the aforementioned information allows to derive high-resolution spatial and temporal emissions for modelling purposes. Estimated annual emissions were compared against independent plant- and country-level inventories, including the Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) and the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) databases, as well as officially reported emission data. An overall good agreement is observed between datasets when comparing the CO2 emissions. The main discrepancies are related to the non-inclusion of auto-producer or heat-only facilities in certain countries due to lack of data. Larger inconsistencies are obtained when comparing emissions from co-emitted species due to uncertainties in the fuel-dependent emission ratios and gap-filling procedures. The temporal distribution of emissions obtained in this work was compared against traditional sector-dependent profiles that are widely used in modelling efforts. This highlighted important differences and the need to consider country dependencies when temporally distributing emissions. The resulting catalogue (https://doi.org/10.24380/mxjo-nram, Guevara et al., 2023) is developed in the framework of the Prototype System for a Copernicus CO2 service (CoCO2) EU-funded project to support the development of the Copernicus CO2 Monitoring and Verification Support capacity (CO2MVS).

Marc Guevara et al.

Status: open (until 11 Jun 2023)

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Marc Guevara et al.

Data sets

CoCO2 global emission point source database Marc Guevara, Santiago Enciso, Carles Tena, Oriol Jorba, Carlos Pérez Garcia-Pando, Stijn Dellaert, Hugo Denier van der Gon https://doi.org/10.24380/mxjo-nram

Marc Guevara et al.

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Short summary
A global dataset of emissions from thermal power plants was created for the year 2018. The resulting catalogue reports annual emissions of CO2 and co-emitted species (NOx, CO, SO2 and CH4) for more than 16000 individual facilities at their exact geographical location. Information on the temporal and vertical distribution of the emissions is also provided at the facility level. The dataset is intended to support current and future satellite emission monitoring and inverse modelling efforts.