Abstract: Reducing the CO2 emissions of China's high energy-consuming industry is one of the most important prerequisites in achieving the target of peaking its total CO2 before 2030. In this paper, we build a theoretical model on identifying the determinants of CO2 emissions by incorporating the energy-augmenting technical progress in the analytical framework. Based on this work, the growth rates of CO2 emissions in China's six high energy-consuming industries are decomposed into four aspects including energy mix effect, scale effect, factor substitution effect, and energy-saving technical progress effect; and the peak paths of each industry's CO2 emissions are also studied using scenario analysis method. The results indicate that:1) the scale effect plays a dominant role in increasing the CO2 emissions for all the industries, especially during the tenth five-year plan; on the contrary, energy-saving technical progress effect and factor substitution effect have limited the increase of industrial CO2 emissions to a certain extent; the energy mix effect is extremely minor. 2) The energy-saving technical progress is the most effective way to reduce the CO2 emissions for four industries although the effect decreased gradually, and the rest two mainly rely on factor substitution effect. 3) In the high emission scenario, the total CO2 emissions of the six high energy-consuming industries continue to grow rapidly, and it is difficult to reach the peak before 2030; in the medium and low emission scenarios, the total CO2 emissions of China's high energy-consuming industry will peak around 2017 and 2023, respectively.
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