Can expanding natural gas consumption reduce China's CO2 emissions?

Bin Xu and Boqiang Lin ()

Energy Economics, 2019, vol. 81, issue C, 393-407

Abstract: China is now the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), thus leading to China facing enormous pressure on CO2 emission reduction. Natural gas is a high thermal and low-emission energy. Expanding natural gas consumption cannot only meet the growing demand for energy consumption but also optimize energy consumption structure. Therefore, many scholars have investigated the effect of natural gas consumption on CO2 emissions. However, ignoring a large number of nonlinear relationships between economic variables, the vast majority of existing studies use traditional linear models to explore the relationships between natural gas consumption and CO2 emissions. In order to make up for the gap in existing research, this paper uses the nonparametric additive regression model with data-driven features to investigate the relationships between the two. The results show that natural gas consumption has an inverted “U-shaped” nonlinear effect on CO2 emissions in the eastern region, but a positive “U-shaped” nonlinear effect in the central and western regions. The linear impact of natural gas consumption on CO2 emissions in the eastern and central regions is higher than that in the western region, due to the differences in resource availability and energy prices, as well as natural gas consumption. Therefore, during the process of promoting natural gas consumption, the central and local governments should adopt heterogeneous measures at different stages of development.

Keywords: Natural gas consumption; CO2 emissions; Nonparametric additive regression model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (56)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988319301264
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:81:y:2019:i:c:p:393-407

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2019.04.012

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 ().