Historical carbon abatement in the commercial building operation: China versus the US

Shufan Zhang, Minda Ma, Kai Li, Zhili Ma, Wei Feng and Weiguang Cai

Energy Economics, 2022, vol. 105, issue C

Abstract: Building is the “last mile” sector in carbon neutrality transition, and commercial buildings have the largest decarbonization potential using current strategies and technologies. This study focused on China and the United States (US) to assess carbon-dioxide (CO2) abatement in commercial building operations at different emission scales and investigate the carbon abatement efficiency of the two countries from 2001 to 2018. The results show that: (i) Economic efficiency and energy intensity are key to reducing CO2 intensity in Chinese and American commercial buildings, respectively; (ii) Generally, CO2 abatement efficiency in China was 1.1–1.9 times that of the US, although CO2 abatement in China and the US in 2001–2018 was close [China: 1451.89 (±549.05) mega-tons of CO2, US: 1929.84 (±757.36) mega-tons of CO2]; (iii) Ridge regression tested the robustness of CO2 abatement results of the assessment model successfully. Furthermore, the study mapped paths for energy efficiency improvement in commercial buildings in China and the US to explore the strategy that best decarbonizes buildings. Overall, this study covers the research gap on a carbon abatement assessment tool for different economies or regions to compare the historical carbon abatement features on building operation.

Keywords: Commercial building; Carbon dioxide abatement; Carbon abatement efficiency; Energy efficiency improvement; Decomposition analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988321005624
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:105:y:2022:i:c:s0140988321005624

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2021.105712

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().