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Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide contributing to human-made global warming. Keeping to the Paris Agreement of staying well below two degrees warming will require a concerted effort to curb methane emissions in addition to necessary decarbonization of the energy systems. The fastest way to achieve emission reductions in the 2050 timeframe is likely through implementation of various technical options. The focus of this study is to explore the technical abatement and cost pathways for reducing global methane emissions, breaking reductions down to regional and sector levels using the most recent version of IIASA's Greenhouse gas and Air pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) model. The diverse human activities that contribute to methane emissions make detailed information on potential global impacts of actions at the regional and sectoral levels particularly valuable for policy-makers. With a global annual inventory for 1990-2015 as starting point for projections, we produce a baseline emission scenario to 2050 against which future technical abatement potentials and costs are assessed at a country and sector/technology level. We find it technically feasible in year 2050 to remove 54 percent of global methane emissions below baseline, however, due to locked in capital in the short run, the cumulative removal potential over the period 2020-2050 is estimated at 38 percent below baseline. This leaves 7.7 Pg methane released globally between today and 2050 that will likely be difficult to remove through technical solutions. There are extensive technical opportunities at low costs to control emissions from waste and wastewater handling and from fossil fuel production and use. A considerably more limited technical abatement potential is found for agricultural emissions, in particular from extensive livestock rearing in developing countries. This calls for widespread implementation in the 2050 timeframe of institutional and behavioural options in addition to technical solutions.

Assessing the marginal abatement costs (MACs) of emissions improves the understanding of the extent of current CO2 mitigation and provides regions and industries with information on how to mitigate emissions cost-effectively. This study proposes a hybrid method to evaluate the MAC. It combines the strengths of bottom-up engineering methods and top-down economy-wide methods. A parametric directional distance function is employed to estimate the MAC from an economic perspective, and the abatement level is further incorporated to generate increasing curves, similar to the outcomes derived from an engineering perspective. In addition, this method takes into consideration whether the abatement level exceeds the abatement potential with current production technologies so as to provide a more realistic estimation of the MAC curves. The proposed technique is applied in estimating the carbon emission MAC in China’s petroleum industry. The estimation results indicate that (i) the MAC of China’s petroleum industry would change from 9821 to 16,307 yuan/ton when the abatement level increases from 1 to 50%; (ii) this industry would spend 36.5 to 42.5 billion Chinese yuan annually to achieve China’s CO2 reduction target proposed in its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs); (iii) assigning the CO2 reduction targets based on the estimated MAC curves instead of the traditional grandfathering abatement target assignment would help to save China’s petroleum industry an additional 29.97 to 33.65% in abatement costs when achieving the NDCs. The MAC curves estimated in this study indicate more accurate relationships between abatement levels and abatement costs, and hence provide decision-makers in industries and governments with a more reliable instrument to determine the prices of emissions permits, total abatement costs, and implementation strategies in an emissions trading scheme.

The complex and changeable external pressures such as government regulations and consumer demand bring challenges to emissions abatement in supply chain. For the asymmetric information between manufacturer and consumer caused by the hidden low-carbon preference and the various carbon policies, this research, based on principal-agent model, constructs three models including the benchmark model without carbon policy, the abatement contract models with single abatement mechanism and multiple abatement mechanism, designs the abatement contract and the single and multiple abatement mechanisms, aiming to improve abatement efficiency and realize low emissions of supply chain. We find that information rent caused by asymmetric information between manufacturer and consumer is the main impact factor of reducing abatement efficiency of supply chain, and the purpose of the abatement contract is that there is not the motivation for consumer to falsely report preference information and accurate consumer demand is obtained by manufacturer. Additionally, although single abatement mechanism can promote manufacturer to reduce emissions, the extra cost caused by carbon tax leads to negative utility to manufacturer. Multiple abatement mechanism can reduce the negative effect of single abatement mechanism on manufacturer and make it obtain more revenue. The research provides a reference for manufacturer in supply chain how to cooperate with government and consumer who possess private information.

Eliminating volatile siloxanes from gas emissions is increasingly important due to their persistent detrimental economic, societal, and environmental impacts. Although physicochemical technologies are currently the only commercially available abatement methods, recently developed biobased technologies are emerging as a more cost-effective and sustainable alternative to promote the removal of volatile siloxanes.

The abatement of the pollutants deriving from diesel engines in the vehicle sector still represents an interesting scientific and technological challenge due to increasingly limiting regulations. Meeting the stringent limits of NOx and soot emissions requires a catalytic system with great complexity, size of units, and number of units, as well as increased fuel consumption. Thus, an after-treatment device for a diesel vehicle requires the use of an integrated catalyst technology for a reduction in the individual emissions of exhaust gas. The representative technologies devoted to the reduction of NOx under lean-burn operation conditions are selective catalytic reduction (SCR) and the lean NOx trap (LNT), while soot removal is mainly performed by filters (DPF). These devices are normally used in sequence, or a combination of them has been proposed to overcome the drawbacks of the individual devices. This review summarizes the current state of NOx and soot abatement strategies. The main focus of this review is on combined technologies for NOx removal (i.e., LNT–SCR) and for the simultaneous removal of NOx and soot, like SCR-on-Filter (SCRoF), in series LNT/DPF and SCR/DPF, and LNT/DPF and SCR/DPF hybrid systems.

Achieving low-carbon development of the cement industry in the developing countries is fundamental to global emissions abatement, considering the local construction industry’s rapid growth. However, there is currently a lack of systematic and accurate accounting and projection of cement emissions in developing countries, which are characterized with lower basic economic country condition. Here, we provide bottom-up quantifications of emissions from global cement production and reveal a regional shift in the main contributors to global cement CO 2 emissions. The study further explores cement emissions over 2020-2050 that correspond to different housing and infrastructure conditions and emissions mitigation options for all developing countries except China. We find that cement emissions in developing countries except China will reach 1.4-3.8 Gt in 2050 (depending on different industrialization trajectories), compared to their annual emissions of 0.7 Gt in 2018. The optimal combination of low-carbon measures could contribute to reducing annual emissions by around 65% in 2050 and cumulative emissions by around 48% over 2020-2050. The efficient technological paths towards a low carbon future of cement industry vary among the countries and infrastructure scenarios. Our results are essential to understanding future emissions patterns of the cement industry in the developing countries and can inform policies in the cement sector that contribute to meeting the climate targets set out in the Paris Agreement. The rapid deployment of low-carbon measures is urgently needed to reduce cement emissions as cement CO 2 emissions from developing countries will almost deplete the remaining cement emissions budget within climate targets.

This research was funded by European Union-Next Generation EU, MINECO, and University of Alicante: MARSALAS21-09, Generalitat Valenciana: CDEIGENT/2018/027, University of Alicante: GRE20-19-A. PID2021-123079OB-I00 project funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and “ERDF A way of making Europe”, European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme: Grant Agreement 101002219 and Generalitat Valenciana: Proyecto Prometeo CIPROM/2021/70.

Non-thermal plasma technique can be easily integrated with catalysis and adsorption for environmental applications such as volatile organic compound (VOC) abatement to overcome the shortcomings of individual techniques. This review attempts to give an overview of the literature about the application of zeolite as adsorbent and catalyst in combination with non-thermal plasma for VOC abatement in flue gas. The superior surface properties of zeolites in combination with its excellent catalytic properties obtained by metal loading make it an ideal packing material for adsorption plasma catalytic removal of VOCs. This work highlights the use of zeolites for cyclic adsorption plasma catalysis in order to reduce the energy cost to decompose per VOC molecule and to regenerate zeolites via plasma.

Catalysts for chemical and electrochemical reactions underpin many aspects of modern technology and industry, from energy storage and conversion to toxic emissions abatement to chemical and materials synthesis. This role necessitates the design of highly active, stable, yet earth-abundant heterogeneous catalysts. In this Review, we present the perovskite oxide family as a basis for developing such catalysts for (electro)chemical conversions spanning carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen chemistries. A framework for rationalizing activity trends and guiding perovskite oxide catalyst design is described, followed by illustrations of how a robust understanding of perovskite electronic structure provides fundamental insights into activity, stability, and mechanism in oxygen electrocatalysis. We conclude by outlining how these insights open experimental and computational opportunities to expand the compositional and chemical reaction space for next-generation perovskite catalysts.