• Energy Research
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Robust mitigation options will play significant role in achieving the target of limiting global change to below 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. To support cooperation for mitigation development, we establish a real options-based model to evaluate the rational decisions of exercising the abandon option for carbon capture and storage-enhanced oil recovery (CCS-EOR) projects under oil market and geological uncertainties. Three possible cooperative mechanisms (fixed carbon dioxide (CO2) price, oil-indexed CO2 price, and joint venture contracts) among CO2-EOR stakeholders are evaluated. The results show that the conflicts in profit maximization targets for different stakeholders in cooperative mitigation are to a great extent unable to be avoided. A joint venture business model is preferred in cooperative mitigation as it can effectively weaken such conflicts. And it is more reasonable to provide incentives to the downstream of the CO2-EOR chain than compensating the adoption cost of carbon capture technologies in the upstream. From a global perspective, the inefficient cooperation can be a main barrier that hinders the development of deep-cutting options. Global mitigation strategies should not only focus on promoting technology progress but also the design of innovative business models to balance the benefits among stakeholders. A joint venture business model is recommended in both the developed and developing countries for seizing the early mitigation opportunities.

Abstract In this study, intergeneric grafting was employed between Populus cathayana and Salix rehderiana to investigate the grafting compatibility of the two Salicaceae plants and to reveal whether grafting can improve their drought resistance. Under different grafting combinations (P. cathayana scion with P. cathayana rootstock, P/P; P. cathayana scion with S. rehderiana rootstock, P/S; S. rehderiana scion with S. rehderiana rootstock, S/S; and S. rehderiana scion with P. cathayana rootstock, S/P), the survival and growth rate, biomass accumulation and allocation, photosynthetic traits, carbon isotope composition (δ13C), relative water content (RWC) and non-structural carbohydrates (NSCs) were measured. The results showed that the grafting compatibility between P. cathayana and S. rehderiana was very high, as the survival rates ranged from 76% to 100% under different grafting combinations. Drought significantly decreased growth, biomass accumulation, photosynthetic pigment contents, net photosynthesis rates (Pn) and RWC, and increased δ13C in all grafting combinations. Under drought stress, biomass accumulation, total chlorophyll, transpiration rate (E) and Pn were higher in P/P and P/S than in S/S and S/P. Compared with P/P, the growth rate, biomass accumulation, root/aboveground ratio (R/A ratio), carotenoid, RWC, starch and total soluble sugar (TSS) of P/S were less affected by drought. The height growth rate (GRH), R/A ratio, carotenoid, chlorophyll a, total chlorophyll, WUEi and TSS of S/P were lower than those of S/S under water-limited conditions. Moreover, a principal component analysis indicated that P/S and S/S had higher drought resistance than P/P and S/P under water deficits. The used method allows combining specific advantageous traits from P. cathayana and S. rehderiana, which may be a highly useful tool to enhance drought resistance in the cultivation of Salicaceae plants.

This study highlights how Chinese economic development detrimentally impacted water quality in recent decades and how this has been improved by enormous investment in environmental remediation funded by the Chinese government. To our knowledge, this study is the first to describe the variability of surface water quality in inland waters in China, the affecting drivers behind the changes, and how the government-financed conservation actions have impacted water quality. Water quality was found to be poorest in the North and the Northeast China Plain where there is greater coverage of developed land (cities + cropland), a higher gross domestic product (GDP), and higher population density. There are significant positive relationships between the concentration of the annual mean chemical oxygen demand (COD) and the percentage of developed land use (cities + cropland), GDP, and population density in the individual watersheds (p < 0.001). During the past decade, following Chinese government-financed investments in environmental restoration and reforestation, the water quality of Chinese inland waters has improved markedly, which is particularly evident from the significant and exponentially decreasing GDP-normalized COD and ammonium (NH4+-N) concentrations. It is evident that the increasing GDP in China over the past decade did not occur at the continued expense of its inland water ecosystems. This offers hope for the future, also for other industrializing countries, that with appropriate environmental investments a high GDP can be reached and maintained, while simultaneously preserving inland aquatic ecosystems, particularly through management of sewage discharge.

In this paper, metabolic evaluation has been employed for better understanding the trends in urban environmental changes. Due to the urban activities cause impacts not only on local level but also a broader scale, Hybrid Emergy-LCA (HEML), a combining approach of Emergy Analysis (EMA) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is structured to quantitatively investigate the mechanism. For the similarity across many emerging cities in China, a large-scale sub-urban residential area named Tian Tongyuan (Try) in Beijing was chosen for testing the HEML. Objective indicators of live quality and negative impacts are both considered. Analysis indicates that the household Emergy input of TTY is 1.76E+16 sej/yr, while the prominent environmental impact is induced by Photochemical Oxidant Creation Potentials (POCP), 4.58E+05 g ethane eq./yr. The sustainable performance constructed by its live quality and environmental impacts of TTY is found as 98.80% as that of Beijing average. Mitigation polices on the building sector should be proposed because of its dominating impacts among various consuming ends of energy and materials. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Microbe-assisted phytoremediation is emerging as one of the most effective means by which plants and their associated rhizosphere microbes degrade organic contaminants in soils. A pot study was conducted to examine the effects of inoculation with Rhizobium meliloti on phytoremediation by alfalfa grown for 90 days in an agricultural soil contaminated with weathered polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Planting with uninoculated alfalfa (P) and alfalfa inoculated with R. meliloti (PR) significantly lowered the initial soil PAH concentrations by 37.2 and 51.4% respectively compared with unplanted control soil. Inoculation with R. meliloti significantly increased the counts of culturable PAH-degrading bacteria, soil microbial activity and the carbon utilization ability of the soil microbial community. The results suggest that the symbiotic association between alfalfa and Rhizobium can stimulate the rhizosphere microflora to degrade PAHs and its application may be a promising bioremediation strategy for aged PAH-contaminated soils.

Abstract The rapid economic development of China has been accompanied by the emission of a great number of pollutants, which in turn have caused severe environmental problems. To strengthen environmental management and to establish a pollution source information database covering all key pollution sources and activities, China carried out its first National Census of Pollution Sources (NCPS) in 2007. The survey contents include the basic environmental situation in 2007, the generation levels of the main pollutants at that time, and the amount of pollution actually discharged into the environment after end-of-pipe treatment at all kinds of pollution sources. Based on the first NCPS report for China released in 2011, and taking two typical industry pollutants, sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ), and chemical oxygen demand (COD) as examples, we first revised the historical data concerning environmental statistics based on the NCPS documents. Subsequently, we analyzed the overall industrial scale in the change of SO 2 and COD emissions using index decomposition analysis, and then studied the contributions and comparative significance of the “three pollution emission reduction measures” put forward by the Chinese government. The latter are: Engineering Emission Reduction (EER), Structure Emission Reduction (SrER) and Supervision Emission Reduction (SuER). From these analyses, we were able to identify the main driving forces for SO 2 and COD emission reduction in China's industrial system. The results indicate that, with continually increasing pollution pressure caused by rapid economic development, EER and SuER have made the greatest contributions to reducing SO 2 and COD emissions; but SrER has not had an obvious effect. In the future, EER and SuER will gradually have less and less potential and become more challenging, while SrER should be achievable through adjusting the economic structure.

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is a gas injection technology that enables the storage of CO2 underground. The aims are twofold, on one hand to reduce the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere and on the other hand to increase oil/gas/heat recovery. Different types of CCUS technologies and related engineering projects have a long history of research and operation in the USA. However, in China they have a short development period ca. 10 years. Unlike CO2 capture and CO2-EOR technologies that are already operating on a commercial scale in China, research into other CCUS technologies is still in its infancy or at the pilot-scale. This paper first reviews the status and development of the different types of CCUS technologies and related engineering projects worldwide. Then it focuses on their developments in China in the last decade. The main research projects, international cooperation, and pilot-scale engineering projects in China are summarized and compared. Finally, the paper examines the challenges and prospects to be experienced through the industrialization of CCUS engineering projects in China. It can be concluded that the CCUS technologies have still large potential in China. It can only be unlocked by overcoming the technical and social challenges.

Abstract The dynamics of isolated-photon plus two-jet production in pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV are studied with the ATLAS detector at the LHC using a dataset corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 36.1 fb−1. Cross sections are measured as functions of a variety of observables, including angular correlations and invariant masses of the objects in the final state, γ + jet + jet. Measurements are also performed in phase-space regions enriched in each of the two underlying physical mechanisms, namely direct and fragmentation processes. The measurements cover the range of photon (jet) transverse momenta from 150 GeV (100 GeV) to 2 TeV. The tree-level plus parton-shower predictions from Sherpa and Pythia as well as the next-to-leading-order QCD predictions from Sherpa are compared with the measurements. The next-to-leading-order QCD predictions describe the data adequately in shape and normalisation except for regions of phase space such as those with high values of the invariant mass or rapidity separation of the two jets, where the predictions overestimate the data.