Chinese Carbon Emissions in 2023 vs. 2024

A couple of days ago I posted an update to my 2023 article on the trend in carbon emissions in China after the pandemic. That blogpost compares emissions for the whole of 2023 to those for the whole of 2019. But what happened in 2024? So far we have nine months of data, which we can compare to the first nine months of 2023.

According to Carbon Monitor, emissions have fallen by 0.6% in 2024 compared to 2023. Emissions from power generation rose by 1.6% with smaller increases in transport (0.7%) and residential (0.8%) emissions offset by a 4% fall in industrial emissions. Does this mean that Chinese emissions are peaking?

Electricity output increased by 6.3% between 2023 and 2024 so far. The increase was supplied by roughly equal increases in thermal power, hydropower, and the new renewables. The increase in hydropower is weather-related and otherwise there would have been a more significant increase in thermal power.

Coal production is only up 0.7% on last year. In the first few months of the year, coal production was lower than in the previous year but by October it was running at 6% above the level of last year.

In conclusion, the fall in emissions so far this year is probably partly due to the increase in hydroelectric output and the slow economy early in the year. This probably doesn't yet constitute a sustainable peak in emissions.

China’s Carbon Emissions Trend after the Pandemic: An Update

Last year, I published an article in The Conversation followed by a paper in Environmental Challenges with Khalid Ahmed on the trend in carbon emissions in China after the pandemic. We concluded that emissions continued to rise strongly after the pandemic. Most of the increase was in the electric power sector. A peak in emissions wasn't yet in sight. Has anything changed in the past year? 

In the published paper, we compared emissions in the first eight months of 2019 - the last year before the pandemic - with the first eight months of 2023 - the first year after the pandemic. Now we can compare data for 2019 as a whole with 2023 as whole:

The differences between 2019 and 2023 for the power sector and total emissions are a little less dramatic than those in the published paper. Emissions in the power sector increased by 18% (21% using just the first 8 months) and total emissions increased by 8% from 2019 to 2023 (10% in the published paper). The data is from Carbon Monitor. Both of these differences are extremely statistically significant. Transport emissions fell by 1% (p = 0.01). The change in residential and industry emissions between the two years are not statistically significant. The published results showed a small but statistically significant increase in industrial emissions and no statistically significant change in transport or residential emissions.

We also presented the contributions of fossil fuels, nuclear, and renewable energy to electricity generation. Here is the graph updated for all twelve months of 2019 and 2023:

The shares of solar and wind increased from 1.6 and 5.0% in 2019 to 3.2% and 9.0% in 2023 but thermal electricity generation increased by 91 TWh p.a. compared to an increased of 51 TWh from the new renewables. Nuclear and hydropower increased by a total of 6 TWh. So, though output of electricity from new renewables increased a lot, thermal power still dominated the increase in electricity generation. The share of thermal power in total generation only fell from 72.2% to 70.1%. Finally, I've updated the coal production data to the end of 2023 (exponential trend fitted):

Coal production for 2023 was 26% higher than coal production in 2019 or a compound annual growth rate of 6%.

None of these results are much different than those in our published paper. But what about 2024? That will be the subject of my next post.