The energy and water nexus in Chinese electricity production: A hybrid life cycle analysis

By Kuishuang Feng, Klaus Hubacek, Y. Siu, Xin Li. 2014

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Between 2000 and 2010, China׳s electricity production had increased threefold and accounted for 50% of domestic and 12% of global CO 2 emissions in 2010. Substantial changes in the electricity fuel mix are urgently required to meet China׳s carbon intensity target of reducing CO 2 emissions by 40–45% by 2020. Moreover, electricity production is the second largest consumer of water in China, but water requirements vary significantly between different electricity generation technologies. By integrating process-based life-cycle analysis (LCA) and input–output analysis (IOA) and through tracking national supply chains, we have provided a detailed account of total life-cycle carbon emissions (g/kWh) and water consumption (l/kWh) for eight electricity generation technologies – (pulverized) coal, gas, oil, hydro, nuclear, wind, solar photovoltaic, and biomass. We have demonstrated that a shift to low carbon renewable electricity generation technologies, i.e. wind, could potentially save more than 79% of total life-cycle CO 2 emissions and more than 50% water consumption per kWh electricity generation compared to the current fuel mix and technology for electricity generation. If the projected wind farms are built by 2020, Inner Mongolia, one of the water scarce northern provinces, would annually save 179 MT CO 2 (i.e. 44% of Inner Mongolia׳s total CO 2 emissions in 2008) and 418 million m 3 (Mm 3 ) water (18% of its industrial water use in 2008) compared with the same amount of electricity produced from coal.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fecd2deb2932a603d5be420050c24dee674d4d3f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. Kuishuang Feng
2. Klaus Hubacek
3. Bo Meng
4. Laixiang Sun
5. D. White
6. D. Guan
7. Zhifu Mi
8. Zhu Liu

Citations in the corpus

• The Water-Energy-Food Nexus in East Asia: A tele-connected value chain analysis using inter-regional input-output analysis (2018, background): “…that calculate both direct water consumed and embodied water from all upstream inputs required by sector (e.g. oil extraction, oil refining, steel and concrete production for structures, crops for biofuel) to meet final energy demand (see Li et al., 2012; Holland et al., 2015; Feng et al., 2014b).”