Toward Accurate, Policy-Relevant Fossil Fuel CO₂ Emission Landscapes

Abstract

The bottom-up (BU) approach has been used to develop spatiotemporally resolved, sectorally disaggregated fossil fuel CO₂ (FFCO₂) emission data products. These efforts are critical constraints to atmospheric assessment of anthropogenic fluxes in addition to offering the climate change policymaking community usable information to guide mitigation. In the United States, there are two high-resolution FFCO₂ emission data products, Vulcan and the Anthropogenic Carbon Emissions System (ACES). As a step toward developing improved, accurate, and detailed FFCO₂ emission landscapes, we perform a comparison of the two data products. We find that while agreeing on total FFCO₂ emissions at the aggregate scale (relative difference = 1.7%), larger differences occur at smaller spatial scales and in individual sectors. Differences in the smaller-emitting sectors are likely errors in ACES input data or emission factors. ACES advances the approach for estimating emissions in the gas and oil sector, while Vulcan shows better geocoordinate correction in the electricity production sector. Differences in the subcounty residential and commercial building sectors are driven by different spatial proxies and suggest a task for future investigation. The gridcell absolute median relative difference, a measure of the average gridcell-scale relative difference, indicates a 53.5% difference. The recommendation for improved BU granular FFCO₂ emission estimation includes review, assessment, and archive of point source geolocations, CO emission input data, CO and CO₂ emission factors, and uncertainty approaches including those due to spatial errors. Finally, intensives where local utility data are publicly available could test the spatial proxies used in estimating residential and commercial building emissions. These steps toward best practices will lead to more accurate, granular emissions, enabling optimal emission mitigation policy choices.