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

Abstract. We present a high-resolution global emission catalogue of CO₂ and co-emitted species (NO_x, 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).