Shipping emissions and their impacts on air quality in China

Abstract

China has >400 ports, is home to 7 of 10 biggest ports in the world and its waterway infrastructure construction has been accelerating over the past years. But the increasing number of ports and ships means increasing emissions, and in turn, increasing impact on local and regional air pollution. This paper presents an overview of the broad field of ship emissions in China and their atmospheric impacts, including topics of ship engine emissions and control, ship emission factors and their measurements, developing of ship emission inventories, shipping and port emissions of the main shipping areas in China, and quantitative contribution of shipping emissions to the local and regional air pollution. There have been an increasing number of studies published on all the above aspects, yet, this review identified some critical research gaps, filling of which is necessary for better control of ship emissions, and for lowering their impacts. In particular, there are very few studies on inland ports and river ships, and there are few national scale ship emission inventories available for China. While advanced method to estimate ship emission based on ship AIS activities makes it now possible to develop high spatial- and temporal-resolution emission inventories, the ship emission factors used in Chinese studies have been based mainly on foreign measurements. Further, the contribution of ship emissions to air pollution in coastal cities, the dispersion of pollution plumes emitted by ships, or the chemical evolution process along the transmission path, have so far not been systematically studied in China.

Maritime NOx Emissions Over Chinese Seas Derived From Satellite Observations

“…The NO x emissions from shipping activities are difficult to detect from space near Chinese coastal areas since the ship tracks are hidden in the outflow of NO 2 plumes from the mainland (see Figure 1a). Traditional ship inventories are often lacking information on these ship activities or have large uncertainties on their ship emissions (C. Wang et al, 2008;Y. Zhang et al, 2017).…”

“…The number of studies of shipping emissions on a regional scale in East Asia is limited, and most of them are at port or city level (Y. Zhang et al, 2017). The application of the data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) significantly reduced uncertainties in bottom-up shipping emission inventories (Jalkanen et al, 2009 (Jalkanen et al, 2016).…”

National- to port-level inventories of shipping emissions in China

“…However, the studies on shipping emissions in Asia are only limited to a few individual ports or regional studies. Zhang et al (2017). National-level or port cluster shipping emissions have not been reported until now.…”

Ship Emission Impacts on Air Quality and Human Health in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) Region, China, in 2015, With Projections to 2030

“…According to Corbett et al (), nearly 70% of the ship's exhaust emissions occur within 400 km from the global coastline. Other studies found a 1–45% increase in local PM 2.5 concentrations due to ship emissions (Chen et al, ; Jeong et al, ; Liu et al, ; Tao et al, ; Viana et al, ; Yau et al, ; Zhang et al, ).…”