CO2 Emissions from Nonenergy Use—Methodological Aspects and a Case Study for Germany

摘要

Nonenergy use is the consumption of fossilfuels as feedstocks for the manufacture of syntheticmaterials, e.g. plastics. Nonenergy partly leads toshort-term carbon dioxide emissions and partly, it isstored in products for longer periods of time. The IPCCguidelines (Reference Approach) offer a top-down methodto estimate the amount of stored carbon. An alternativemethod is material flow analysis, a bottom-upcalculation method. A prerequisite for the applicationof both methods is that nonenergy use data published innational energy balances comply with a common definition.We found that this is not always the case and that theresulting errors can be considerable, i.e. approx. 10%for Germany and 30% for Italy. Therefore, we performeda harmonization step for nonenergy data. We then appliedthe IPCC method and material flow analysis to Germany.One result is that the material-flow analysis confirmsthe outcome according to the IPCC Reference Approach.Another result is that total carbon losses equal about 10% of nonenergy use.