Achieving air pollutant emission reduction targets with minimum abatement costs: An enterprise-level allocation method with constraints of fairness and feasibility

Highlights

• Quantification of efficiency and fairness of abatement allocation are optimized.

• Allocation results are refined to the different abatement measures of enterprises.

• Optimized allocation results reduce abatement costs and tap the abatement space.

• Abatement suggestions are given to enterprises with different abatement quotas.

Abstract

For achieving air pollutant emission reduction targets, total pollutant amount control is being continuously promoted in China. However, the traditional pattern of pollutant emission reduction allocation regardless of economic cost often results in unreasonable emission reduction pathways, and industrial enterprises as the main implementers have to pay excessively high costs. Therefore, this study adopted economic efficiency as its main consideration, used specific emission reduction measures (ERMs) of industrial enterprises as minimum allocation units, and constructed an enterprise-level pollutant emission reduction allocation (EPERA) model with minimization of the total abatement cost (TAC) as the objective function, and fairness and feasibility as constraints for emission reduction allocation. Taking City M in China as an example, the EPERA model was used to construct a Pareto optimal frontier and obtain the optimal trade-off result. Results showed that under basic and strict emission reduction regulations, the TAC of the optimal trade-off point was reduced by 46.40% and 45.77%, respectively, in comparison with that achieved when only considering fairness, and the Gini coefficient was 0.26 and 0.31, respectively. The abatement target was attained with controllable cost and relatively fair and reasonable allocation. In addition, enterprises allocated different emission reduction quotas under different ERMs had specific characteristics that required targeted optimization of technology and equipment to enable them to achieve optimal emission reduction effects for the same abatement cost.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Pollutant emission reduction allocation / Emission reduction measures / Total abatement cost / Economic efficiency / Abatement space

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Capital Blue Sky Action Cultivation Program of “Research on the Whole Process Control Technology of Pollution Sources in Industrial Parks and Research and Demonstration of Smart Environmental Protection Platforms” Project of Beijing Science and Technology Plan (Project No. Z191100009119010).

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-021-1459-6 and is accessible for authorized users.

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