Spatiotemporal evolution and driving factors for GHG emissions of aluminum industry in China

Abstract

China’s aluminum (Al) production has released a huge amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As one of the biggest country of primary Al production, China must mitigate its overall GHG emission from its Al industry so that the national carbon neutrality target can be achieved. Under such a background, the study described in this paper conducts a dynamic material flow analysis to reveal the spatiotemporal evolution features of Al flows in China from 2000 to 2020. Decomposition analysis is also performed to uncover the driving factors of GHG emission generated from the Al industry. The major findings include the fact that China’s primary Al production center has transferred to the western region; the primary Al smelting and carbon anode consumption are the most carbon-intensive processes in the Al life cycle; the accumulative GHG emission from electricity accounts for 78.14% of the total GHG emission generated from the Al industry; China’s current Al recycling ratio is low although the corresponding GHG emission can be reduced by 93.73% if all the primary Al can be replaced by secondary Al; and the total GHG emission can be reduced by 88.58% if major primary Al manufacturing firms are transferred from Inner Mongolia to Yunnan. Based upon these findings and considering regional disparity, several policy implications are proposed, including promotion of secondary Al production, support of clean electricity penetration, and relocation of the Al industry.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

aluminum / material flow analysis / GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions / LMDI (logarithmic mean divisa index)

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Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2019YFC1908501), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 72088101, 71810107001, and 71690241), the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 2018M641989), Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant No. 2020SJA2358), and the China Scholarship Council Program (Grant No. 202008320101).

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11708-022-0819-7 and is accessible for authorized users.

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