Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels: a procedure for estimation and results for 1950-1982

Abstract

With growing concern about climatic changes that could result from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, it is appropriate to use the improved statistics on the production and use of fossil fuels which are now available and to review the CO, discharges to the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning. Data on global fuel production and the chemical composition of these fuels have been re-examined and an attempt has been made to estimate the fraction of fuel which is used in the petrochemicals industry or otherwise not soon oxidized. Available statistics now permit more systematic treatment of natural gas liquids than in earlier calculations. Values used for combustion efficiency and non-fuel use on a global scale still require some estimation and extrapolation from United States data but can be bounded with sufficient precision that they add little uncertainty to the calculation of global CO, emissions. Data now available permit the computation to be made with confidence that there are no major oversights. The differences from earlier calculations of CO, emissions are minor, well within the uncertainty limits in the data available. The fundamental problems of assembling a data set on global fuel production limit the utility of striving for too much precision at other steps in the calculation. Annual CO, emissions retain an uncertainty of 6-10%.Results of the calculations for 1980 through 1982 show decreases from 1979 CO, emissions. This is the first time since the end of World War I1 that the emissions have decreased 3 years in succession. During the period following the 1973 escalation of fuel prices, the growth rate of emissions has been less than half what it was during the 1950s and 1960s (1.5%/year since 1973 as opposed to 4.5%/year through the 1950s and 1960s). Most of the change is a result of decreased growth in the use of oil. through 1982, the amount of fossil fuel produced and the amount of CO, discharged to the atmosphere as a consequence. A final graph will display, for each fuel and for the global total, how CO, emissions have varied as a function of time. Tellus 36B (1984), 4 G. MARLAND A N D R. M. ROTTY 1 4 Imports 498 Domestic 932 G . MARLAND A N D R. M. ROTTY 382 Distillate Fuel Oil and Kerosene 172 Residual Fuel Oil 121 Jet Fuel 59 LPG and Ethane 85 Other (including adjustment) Refineries FO, = effective fraction oxidized in year of production = 0.9 18 -t 3 % C, = carbon content in tons C per ton crude oil = 0.85 ? 1 Yo CO,\ = CO, emissions in lo6 tons C P , = annual production in lo6 tons coal equivalent (? -1 1.2%) FO, = effective fraction oxidized in year of production = 0.982 & 2 % C, = carbon content in tons C per ton coal equivalent = 0.746** t 2% CO,, = CO, emissions in lo6 tons C P, = annual gas flaring in lo9 m' (? -20%) FO, = effective fraction oxidized in year of flaring = 1.00 ? 1 % C, = carbon content in tons per thousand m3 = 0.525 & 3 %

Sources of variations in total column carbon dioxide

“…Fossil emissions in the model are annual mean emissions for the year 1990 (Andres et al, 1996), when net global emissions were 5.5 Pg C y −1 . These emissions are determined from self-reported fuel consumption at the national level and converted to regional fluxes proportional to local population density (Marland and Rotty, 1984).…”

Emissions, Concentrations, & Temperature: A Time Series Analysis

“…The uncertainty associated with many of the series in Box 1 has been examined explicitly. Marland and Rotty (1984 find that fossil fuel emissions have an error of about 10 percent after 1950. Before 1950, the error is about 20 percent (Keeling, 1973).…”

“…Endogenous Variables Identities ECO 2 Anthropogenic carbon emissions (Houghton and Hackler, 1999;Marland and Rotty, 1984) GLOBL Global Surface Temperature (Nicholls et al, 1994;Parker et al, 1998) RF (prefix) Radiative Forcing CO 2 , CH 9 , CFC 11 , CFC 12 , N 2 O (Shine et al, 1991;Kattenberg et al, 1996) ECH 4 Anthropogenic methane emissions (Kaufmann and Stern, 1996) CO 2 Atmospheric concentrations (Keeling and Whorf, 1994;Etheridge et al, 1996;) SOX (Wigley and Raper, 1992) CFC Atmospheric concentration of CFC's (Prather et al, 1987;Elkins et al, 1994) CH 4 Atmospheric concentrations (Etheridge et al, 1994;Khalil and Rasmussen, 1994;Dlugokenchy et al, 1994) N 2 O Atmospheric concentration of N 2 O (Prinn et al, 1990(Prinn et al, , 1995Machida et al, 1995) SOX Anthropogenic sulfur emissions (ASL, 1997) SUN Solar irradiance (Lean et al, 1995) SOI Southern Oscillation Index (Allen et al, 1991) NAO Northern Atlantic Oscillation Index (Hurrel, 1995) RFSS Radiative forcing of stratospheric sulfates in the northern hemisphere (appendix N) or southern hemisphere (appendix S) and latitude (appendix) (Sato et al, 1993) their atmospheric concentrations contain a stochastic trend. Traditionally, analyses of the temperature record avoid the assumption of stochastic trends because these trends are characterized by their long-term memory -the effects of innovations do not fade over time.…”

Biogeochemical aspects of atmospheric methane

“…Also, natural gas is not all CH4, but is typically 89 to 93%. Our figure, 45 x 10 •2 g CH4/yr in Table 4, obtains from an assumed loss of 2.5% of total production for the early 1980s, plus 14 x 10 x2 g CH4/yr to account for unburnt CH4 in flaring and venting [Marland and Rotty, 1984], underwater venting from offshore production platforms [Sackett and Barber, 1988], and other stray and explosive losses. Methane released from coal mining and natural gas usage has increased in recent years.…”