Emission intensity
is the emission rate of a given pollutant relative to the intensity of a specific activity, or an industrial production process; for example grams of carbon dioxide released per megajoule of energy produced, or the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions produced to gross domestic product (GDP).
Emission intensities are used to derive estimates of air pollutant or greenhouse gas emissions based on the amount of fuel combusted, the number of animals in animal husbandry, on industrial production levels, distances traveled or similar activity data.
One commonly used figure is carbon intensity per kilowatt-hour (CIPK), which is used to compare emissions from different sources of electrical power.
[4] Such highly skewed carbon intensity patterns necessitate disaggregation of seemingly homogeneous emission activities and proper consideration of many factors for understanding.
Legend: B = Black coal (supercritical)–(new subcritical), Br = Brown coal (new subcritical), cc = combined cycle, oc = open cycle, TL = low-temperature/closed-circuit (geothermal doublet), TH = high-temperature/open-circuit, WL = Light Water Reactors, WH = Heavy Water Reactors, #Educated estimate.
The following tables show carbon intensity of GDP in market exchange rates (MER) and purchasing power parities (PPP).
The USA posted a higher ratio of 0.41 kCO2/$05p while Europe showed the largest drop in CO2 intensity compared to the previous year (−3.7%).
[16] This shows that global emissions has grown rapidly, increasing by about 2.1% each year compared from the previous decade.
The UNFCCC has accepted the Revised 1996 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories,[20] developed and published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the emission estimation methods that must be used by the parties to the convention to ensure transparency, completeness, consistency, comparability and accuracy of the national greenhouse gas inventories.
Natural gas, being methane (CH4), has 4 hydrogen atoms to burn for each one of carbon and thus has medium CO2 emission intensity.
In an August 31, 2018 article by Masnadi et al. which was published by Science, the authors used "open-source oil-sector CI modeling tools" to "model well-to-refinery carbon intensity (CI) of all major active oil fields globally—and to identify major drivers of these emissions.
[27][28] The Science study, which was conducted by Stanford University found that Canadian crude oil is the "fourth-most greenhouse gas (GHG) intensive in the world" behind Algeria, Venezuela and Cameroon.
