Article
Environmental Sciences
Ruxing Wan, Ling Tang, Jing Guo, Wenhui Zhai, Ling Li, Yang Xie, Xin Bo, Jun Wu
Summary: Over the past decade, thermal power plants in China, the largest energy infrastructure in the country, have consumed half of China's coal and posed threats to air quality, human health, and socioeconomic development. To alleviate these impacts, China has implemented a series of control policies, leading to significant reductions in air pollutant emissions. However, the effects of ultra-low emissions (ULE) policies on air quality, health, and cost benefits are still not well understood. This study estimates the improved air quality, health benefits, and economic gains achieved through ULE standards in the thermal power sector by employing a measure-specific approach. The results indicate that all control measures have resulted in reduced air pollution, with renovating pre-existing units being the most effective measure. Compared to not implementing the ULE policy, the implementation of these measures could lead to decreased population-weighted average PM2.5 and O3 concentrations, as well as the avoidance of 67,831 premature deaths nationwide. Additionally, the study demonstrates a net economic benefit of 109.92 billion Yuan (in 2015 value) in China when considering health benefits and costs due to control measures. These findings highlight the importance of considering health impacts in policy-making and provide possible strategies for further promoting control measures in China and tightening emission standards for thermal power plants worldwide.
JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT
(2023)
Article
Economics
Chang Tang, Yu Qi, Naqib Ullah Khan, Ruwei Tang, Yan Xue
Summary: This paper examines the impact of ultra-low emission standards (ULES) on the productivity of thermal power corporations in China. The study finds that ULES significantly inhibit improvements in productivity by increasing costs, squeezing out innovation, and reducing efficiency. Non-state-owned corporations, financially constrained corporations, and corporations in China's eastern region are more affected by ULES. It suggests that the design of environmental standards should consider economic costs and risks in the green and low-carbon transition process.
Article
Environmental Sciences
Deming Han, Qingru Wu, Shuxiao Wang, Liwen Xu, Lei Duan, Minneng Wen, Guoliang Li, Zhijian Li, Yi Tang, Kaiyun Liu
Summary: This study investigated the distribution and emissions of trace elements in coal-fired power plants after ultra-low emission retrofitting using field experiments, literature surveys, and model calculations. The removal efficiencies of volatile Hg and semi-volatile As/Pb were remarkably improved by the retrofitting, while non-volatile elements were slightly affected. The concentrations of trace elements in the emitted gas were low but accounted for a high proportion of the gas phase. The study suggests revising emission limits to control intense trace element pollution in China.
SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Lishan Ran, David E. Butman, Tom J. Battin, Xiankun Yang, Mingyang Tian, Clement Duvert, Jens Hartmann, Naomi Geeraert, Shaoda Liu
Summary: The study reveals a significant decrease in CO2 emissions from Chinese inland waters over the past few decades, mainly influenced by environmental changes and reforestation programs. Meanwhile, CO2 emissions from inland waters in the Tibetan Plateau show an increasing trend, likely due to increased terrestrial deliveries of organic carbon and climate change.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2021)
Article
Environmental Sciences
Paterson McKeough
Summary: This study estimated the impacts of different time periods for reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions on global mean temperature. The results showed that rapid phaseout of CO2 emissions is crucial for bending the global temperature curve. Reductions in CH4 emissions can be delayed until 2050-2080 without significantly affecting the global temperature in 2100. The analysis highlighted the dependence of abatement costs on the delay in reducing CO2 emissions or CH4 emissions. Delaying CO2 emissions increases both the temperature overshoot and abatement costs, while delaying CH4 emissions until 2050-2080 actually lowers overall abatement costs. To ensure sufficient resources for near-term reductions in CO2 emissions, a new instrument is proposed to prioritize CO2 emissions reductions over CH4 emissions reductions.
Article
Energy & Fuels
Malin Pettersson, Johanna Olofsson, Pal Borjesson, Lovisa Bjornsson
Summary: Integrating fast pyrolysis technology into existing wood-fuelled CHP plants for bio-oil production offers a promising opportunity for significant greenhouse gas emission reduction, especially in the transport sector. The adoption of this technology could potentially lead to an annual GHG emission avoidance of up to 10.3 MtCO(2)-eq, highlighting the importance of transitioning to a fossil-free energy system across European countries.
Article
Green & Sustainable Science & Technology
Xuelin Tian, Chunjiang An, Mazdak Nik-Bakht, Zhikun Chen
Summary: This study combines on-ground air pollutant emission inventory (NPRI) with satellite monitoring data to verify the impact of reducing emissions from power plants on overall air pollution. The results show significant reductions in column density of NO2 hot spots in Canadian provinces, particularly in Ontario, where total NO2 releases from power plants decreased by 98.4% and the total value of NO2 concentration decreased by 70.5% from 2008 to 2017.
JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION
(2022)
Article
Environmental Sciences
Ahmed Abdulla, Fabian J. E. Telschow, Julia Dohner, Ralph F. Keeling, Armin Schwartzman, David G. Victor
Summary: A significant challenge in international cooperation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is the lack of confidence in the impact of national policy efforts on climate change. This study applies a detection protocol to determine when the measurable signal of atmospheric CO2 can be distinguished from carbon cycle noise and emission trend uncertainties. The results suggest that it can take 11-16 years to detect progress in aggressive mitigation scenarios, and even longer for less ambitious scenarios. The implications of these findings for the Paris Agreement's global stocktake requirement are discussed.
ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS
(2023)
Article
Thermodynamics
Yonglong Yang, Chenghang Zheng, Qiufeng Su, Yifan Wang, Yan Lu, Yang Zhang, Yue Zhu
Summary: This paper investigates the removal and emission characteristics of SOx (SO2 and SO3) in wet limestone-gypsum flue gas desulfurization (WFGD) based on data collected from 95 ultra-low emission coal-fired power units. The study shows that the overall removal efficiency of single absorber is above 97.5%, with the SO3 removal efficiency between 31% and 70%. Installation of inner structures in the spray absorber shows a more obvious correlation between inlet SO2 concentration and SOx removal efficiency.
CASE STUDIES IN THERMAL ENGINEERING
(2021)
Article
Engineering, Environmental
Yaqin Guo, Bin Chen, Yanxian Li, Sili Zhou, Xiaowei Zou, Ning Zhang, Yuran Zhou, Huanxin Chen, Jun Zou, Xianhai Zeng, Yuli Shan, Jiashuo Li
Summary: China has implemented measures to address air pollutants and carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants while reducing toxic heavy metal emissions. By analyzing historical heavy metal emissions, this study assesses the evolution of emissions in different scenarios and identifies effective measures for reducing emissions. The findings are important for meeting the requirements of the Minamata Convention and carbon neutrality.
RESOURCES CONSERVATION AND RECYCLING
(2022)
Article
Green & Sustainable Science & Technology
Hyunsik Kim, Sungho Tae
Summary: The study aimed to propose an emission evaluation model to support the establishment of management policies for construction site PM emissions in South Korea. It calculated PM10, PM2.5, NOx, SOx, and VOCs emission factors for equipment in construction sites, estimated annual total emissions, and presented criteria for evaluating the adequacy of the estimated emissions.
Article
Green & Sustainable Science & Technology
Hao Jin, Chaoliang Liu, Shiyi Chen
Summary: This study combines datasets to explore the impact of environmental regulation on firm chemical oxygen demand (COD) emissions in China. The results show that environmental regulation reduces COD emissions and has a larger effect on reducing emission intensity. The study also finds that front-end preventive control is effective in improving COD emissions.
JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION
(2022)
Article
Engineering, Environmental
Nophea Sasaki
Summary: The study assessed the carbon emission reductions through improved forest management and the use of wood biomasses as substitutes for fossil fuels in Southeast Asia, presenting potential annual emission reductions and revenue predictions.
RESOURCES CONSERVATION AND RECYCLING
(2021)
Article
Thermodynamics
P. U. Akpan, W. F. Fuls
Summary: This paper discusses the application of a V-TCHR model to determine the CO2 emissions factor of coal-fired power plants at various load conditions. A demonstration study was carried out to investigate CO2 emission characteristics at part load of six hypothetical CFPPs, showing promising results. The variable emissions factor model presented in this study is useful to energy modellers as it does not require detailed plant models and can be applied to any hypothetical CFPP-based energy system.
Article
Environmental Studies
Madhur D. Gajbhiye, Sandhiya Lakshmanan, Naresh Kumar, Sujit Bhattacharya, Shivnarayan Nishad
Summary: In an effort to reduce vehicular emissions, India has implemented Bharat Stage (BS) emission standards since 2000 and shifted to BS-VI norms from April 2020. This study analyzes the impact of different stages of BS emission standards on pollutant emissions. The results show reductions in CO, NMVOC, OC, and BC emissions in 2021 compared to 2017, but an increase in NOx emissions. The findings highlight the need for a balanced integration of emission control technologies to address the new pollutants and increase in NOx levels.
TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH PART D-TRANSPORT AND ENVIRONMENT
(2023)
Article
Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism
Yuying Sun, Jian Zhang, Xin Li, Shouyang Wang
Summary: This study proposes a time-varying jackknife model averaging approach to improve the accuracy of tourism forecasting. The empirical results show that this method outperforms other competitors in out-of-sample tourism forecasting.
JOURNAL OF TRAVEL RESEARCH
(2023)
Article
Economics
Congping Yang, Tong Shu, Sheng Liang, Shou Chen, Shouyang Wang
Summary: This paper explores the optimization of integrated vehicle routing for package collection and delivery in rural areas. By establishing a vehicle routing model and designing a two-stage algorithm, it can improve vehicle loading rate, service coverage rate, and reduce cost.
Article
Economics
Qi Zhang, Yi Hu, Jianbin Jiao, Shouyang Wang
Summary: This paper examines whether the government's control of refined oil prices can act as a shock absorber and mitigate economic impact. Using the SVAR model and dividing the sample into two sub-samples based on price regulation, it finds that there was high price regulation of refined oil before May 2009. During this period, price regulation significantly hindered economic growth when oil prices fell. However, after May 2009, the degree of price control was reduced and it promoted industrial investment and GDP growth to some extent, acting as a shock absorber. In the post-epidemic era, it is necessary to continue implementing short-term refined oil price control measures in line with China's situation, while gradually liberalizing price control in the long run to establish a market-driven pricing mechanism reflecting supply and demand. Additionally, it is important to improve and develop China's crude oil futures market and establish a modern oil circulation system.
Article
Engineering, Environmental
Yiyi Cao, Shen Qu, Heran Zheng, Jing Meng, Zhifu Mi, Weiming Chen, Yi-Ming Wei
Summary: In order to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, China needs to make significant changes to its socioeconomic systems and allocate emissions responsibility appropriately. Traditional methods of responsibility delineation can lead to double counting, so an alternative method based on economic welfare gains from environmental externalities has been refined. This approach ensures that the responsibilities of consumers and producers add up to the total emissions. Applying this method to 48 countries and 31 Chinese provinces reveals variations in responsibilities, indicating potential for more comprehensive and accessible policy goals.
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Engineering, Environmental
Kehan He, Zhifu Mi, Jin Zhang, Jinkai Li, D'Maris Coffman
Summary: China's domestic CO2 emissions are unevenly distributed, with increasing emissions from the less developed northwest region to the rest of China. This trend is attributed to industrial upgrading and disparity in regional development. Additionally, CO2 emissions exported from China to the rest of the world have decreased, with other developing countries filling the gap. Policy makers need to be alerted to prevent further pollution migration.
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Ling Tang, Min Jia, Junai Yang, Ling Li, Xin Bo, Zhifu Mi
Summary: China, as the world's largest industrial producer, faces significant industrial atmospheric pollution, especially from particulate matter, SO2, and NOx emissions. In order to better understand industrial emission characteristics, a nationwide and up-to-date air pollutant emission inventory named Chinese Industrial Emissions Database (CIED) has been created, utilizing real smokestack concentrations from China's continuous emission monitoring systems (CEMS) during 2015-2018. The use of this CEMS data allows for direct estimation of industrial emission factors and absolute emissions, increasing estimation accuracy and reliability.
Article
Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism
Yanzhao Li, Dongchuan Yang, Ju'e Guo, Shaolong Sun, Shouyang Wang
Summary: The global tourism industry is facing difficulties in recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to investigate the reliability of statistical modelling methods in forecasting daily tourism demand under the new normal after travel restrictions are eased or lifted. The proposed improved framework proves to be superior and practical in predicting daily tourism demand both before and during COVID-19. There is a need for further research on the comparability of tourism demand forecasting.
CURRENT ISSUES IN TOURISM
(2023)
Article
Economics
Jin Xiao, Yu Zhong, Yanlin Jia, Yadong Wang, Ruoyi Li, Xiaoyi Jiang, Shouyang Wang
Summary: In this study, we propose a novel deep ensemble credit scoring model for internet finance using a combination of variational autoencoder and deep forest. Our model shows good performance in dealing with highly class-imbalanced and non-linear datasets and exhibits strong ability to learn complex distributions.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF FORECASTING
(2024)
Article
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Shuang Yuan, Peng Jia, Shouyang Wang
Summary: Accurate forecasting of railway container demand is crucial for railway infrastructure construction and daily operations management. In this study, a novel secondary decomposition-ensemble method is proposed for railroad container volume forecasting. The time series is decomposed into various components and each component is processed by different models to yield independent predictions, which are then ensembled for the final forecast.
APPLIED SOFT COMPUTING
(2023)
Article
Engineering, Environmental
Xin Tian, Yiling Xiong, Zhifu Mi, Qianzhi Zhang, Kailan Tian, Bin Zhao, Zhaoxin Dong, Shuxiao Wang, Dian Ding, Jia Xing, Yun Zhu, Shicheng Long, Pingdan Zhang
Summary: Different roles in the value chain lead to significant mismatches between social welfare gains and health damage. Atmospheric transport partially reduces these mismatches but increases health damage in densely populated and lower polluted regions. The fairness of social welfare allocation along the value chain, considering the environmental and health effects, is underinvestigated.
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Environmental Sciences
Jing Guo, Xin Bo, Yang Xie, Ling Tang, Jun Xu, Zhongzhi Zhang, Ruxing Wan, Haiyun Xu, Zhifu Mi
Summary: This study estimates the emission and environmental impacts of dioxins from Chinese municipal solid waste incinerators using real data. The majority of incinerators meet emission standards, keeping the emissions and health risks below safety levels. The implementation of waste sorting programs will further reduce emissions and health risks.
JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT
(2023)
Article
Green & Sustainable Science & Technology
Ling Tang, Junai Yang, Zixuan Li, Shuying Zhu, Xiaomeng Zhang, Bofeng Cai
Summary: This study develops a city-level allocation method for carbon emission quotas by establishing a detailed carbon emissions database and proposing a hybrid method based on fairness and efficiency. The results show that cities in the Pearl River Delta region obtain a larger share of emission quotas (over 70%) while cities in less developed regions like Northern Guangdong have a smaller share (less than 10%).
ENVIRONMENT DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY
(2023)
Article
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
Jin Xiao, Yuhang Tian, Yanlin Jia, Xiaoyi Jiang, Lean Yu, Shouyang Wang
Summary: This study researches the security issue of credit card fraud detection (CCFD) models based on machine learning, which has been rarely considered in existing research. A black-box attack-based security evaluation framework for CCFD models is proposed, combining semisupervised learning technique and transfer-based black-box attack to construct two versions of a semisupervised transfer black-box attack algorithm. A new nonlinear optimization model is introduced to generate adversarial examples against CCFD models, along with a security evaluation index to quantitatively evaluate their security. Experimental results show that all six supervised models considered largely lose their ability to identify fraudulent transactions when facing the adversarial examples generated by the proposed attack algorithms, while the two unsupervised models are less affected. This suggests that CCFD models based on supervised machine learning may have substantial security risks. In addition, the evaluation results for model security generate important managerial implications to assist banks in reasonably evaluating and enhancing model security.
INFORMS JOURNAL ON COMPUTING
(2023)
Article
Engineering, Environmental
Xinlu Sun, Zhifu Mi
Summary: The outbreak of COVID-19 has had profound impacts on carbon emissions in China, particularly through structural changes in the determinants of carbon emissions. The study reveals that per capita final demand has contributed to slower emissions growth, while production structure has driven a greater increase in carbon emissions. Export-led emissions growth has rebounded, and investment-led emissions have become more concentrated in the construction sector. The carbon intensity of several heavy industries has increased, indicating a deterioration in production structure. Policymakers should focus on increasing investment in low-carbon industries and shifting towards consumption-led growth for a green recovery from the pandemic.
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Energy & Fuels
Kun Yang, Zishu Cheng, Mingchen Li, Shouyang Wang, Yunjie Wei
Summary: This paper proposes a forecasting and investing framework for the crude oil market by integrating interval models and machine learning models. It utilizes natural language processing to analyze text information from social and news media for capturing market sentiment. Deep learning models are then integrated to combine sentiment data with economic variables for more accurate price predictions. Furthermore, a trading strategy with interval constraints is introduced to reduce trading risk arising from point forecasts.