Environmental impact of mining-associated carbon emissions and analysis of cleaner production strategies in China
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Environmental impact of mining-associated carbon emissions and analysis of cleaner production strategies in China Boyu Yang 1 & Zhongke Bai 1,2 & Junjie Zhang 1 Received: 8 May 2020 / Accepted: 4 November 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In recent years, concern has been increasing regarding the carbon emissions generated by mining activities. China is an extremely large coal producer (3695 Mt/2015) and consumer (3698 Mt/2015), and Shanxi Province (i.e., a major coal-producing province in China) is a crucial element in China’s energy conservation and emission reduction goals. In this study, the Pingshuo mining area (PMA) in Shanxi Province was chosen as a case to analyze the dynamic changes in carbon emissions based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) method, and the factors influencing carbon emissions were analyzed via the IPAT equation. Carbon emission sources in opencast mines mainly included fuel and explosive use, coal mine methane escape, coal and gangue spontaneous combustion, and electricity consumption. The carbon emission of the PMA increased from 4 × 104 Mg in 1986 to 1.05 × 106 Mg in 2015, with an average annual increase of 11.64%. In the PMA, 4.71 × 106 Mg of carbon emissions from fuel consumption accounted for 41.79% of carbon emissions, and 5.26 × 106 Mg of carbon emissions from methane emissions accounted for 46.66%. Carbon emissions from explosives and electricity use were 4.1 × 105 Mg and 8.8 × 105 Mg, respectively. In this mining area, the factors influencing carbon emissions included population, GDP, and coal output. The results of this study not only provide a reference for cleaner production in mining areas but also lay a foundation for the study of global opencast coal mining carbon emissions. Keywords Carbon sources . Mining activities . Pingshuo opencast mine . Driving force . IPAT equation . Carbon emission reduction
Introduction The European Union has been eagerly involved to increase its emissions reduction target for 2020 from 20% to 30%, and the Chinese government submitted an emissions reduction plan to the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Lai et al. 2016). The specific goal is to reduce CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by 2030 by 60–65% compared to 2005 values. Coal consumption contributed 72% of China’s carbon emission and 19% of global emission Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Zhongke Bai [email protected] 1
School of Land Science and Technology, China University of Geosciences, Beijing 100083, People’s Republic of China
2
Key Lab of Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation, The Ministry of Natural Resources, Beijing 100035, People’s Republic of China
(Wang and Li 2016). Like other industrial sectors, the mining sector is under increased pressure to achieve energy conservation and emission reduction (Norgate and Haque 2010). Opencast mining processes provide the possibility for achieving high productivity, albeit at the expense of serious environmental d
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